Time and Episodic Memory: Neuropsychology Meets Philosophy

这个项目调查记忆过去个人经历的能力如何有助于时间意识的产生和保持。患有间歇性健忘症的人，也就是对生动的个人过去经历的健忘症，在科学和流行媒体中都被建模为被困在时间中。这个核心隐喻塑造了我们对情节记忆是什么(心理时间旅行)以及它在我们作为人的生活中的作用(在时间中锚定我们)的理解。因此，健忘症被视为一种影响个人整个主观临时性的病理，它破坏了人们对未来的决定，破坏了自主生活的所有可能性。我们的工作表明，健忘症患者并不是被困在时间里；他们作为道德和实际代理人的能力比被困在时间里的模型所能预测的要多。我们研究了阵发性健忘症患者的时间认知，以了解情景记忆如何参与对时间的认知。健忘症患者会发展并保持过去、现在和未来的概念吗？他们是否了解时间的不可逆转顺序，或者事件可以从早到晚进行排序？他们关心未来和过去的区别吗？在他们的实际和道德决策中，他们是否会贴现未来回报的价值，做出冲动的选择，或者表现出现实主义的偏见？我们和其他实验室的研究越来越多地表明，健忘症患者并不是被时间所困，而是很好地理解时间及其含义。这些发现对于对记忆在人类生活中的价值感兴趣的人文主义者、对我们的时间知识来源感兴趣的哲学家、努力理解记忆是什么以及它如何影响我们作为人的生活的科学家来说是革命性的，最后对于试图帮助记忆丧失的人过上更充实的人生的临床医生来说是革命性的。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.