Time and Episodic Memory: Neuropsychology Meets Philosophy

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This project investigates how the capacity to remember past personal experiences contributes to the emergence and maintenance of the sense of time. Individuals with episodic amnesia, that is, amnesia for vivid personal past experiences, are modeled in both science and the popular media as trapped in time. This core metaphor shapes our understanding both of what episodic memory is (mental time travel) and of its role in our lives as people (anchoring us in time). Amnesia is seen accordingly as a pathology affecting an individual’s entire subjective temporality, one that undermines their decisions about the future and scuttles all possibility of autonomous living. Our work shows that amnesic individuals are not trapped in time; they are capable of more as moral and practical agents than the trapped-in-time model would lead one to predict. We study temporal cognition in individuals with episodic amnesia to learn how episodic memory is involved in cognition about time. Do individuals with amnesia develop and maintain concepts of the past, present, and future? Do they understand time’s irreversible order or that events can be sequenced earlier to later? Do they care about the difference between the future and the past? Do they discount the value of future rewards, make impulsive choices, or exhibit presentist bias in their practical and moral decisions? Research in our and other labs increasingly reveals that individuals with amnesia are not trapped in time but understand time and its implications well. These findings are transformative for humanists interested in the value of memory in human life, philosophers interested in the source of our knowledge of time, scientists struggling to understand what memory is and how it contributes to our lives as persons, and, finally, to clinicians trying to help people with memory loss live fuller human lives.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.