The recursive grammar of mental time travel.

Abstract

One apparent feature of mental time travel is the ability to recursively embed temporal perspectives across different times: humans can remember how we anticipated the future and anticipate how we will remember the past. This recursive structure of mental time travel might be formalized in terms of a 'grammar' that is reflective of but more general than linguistic notions of absolute and relative tense. Here, I provide a foundation for this grammatical framework, emphasizing a bounded (rather than unbounded) recursive function that supports mental time travel to a limited temporal depth and to actual and possible scenarios. Anticipated counterfactual thinking, for instance, entails three levels of mental time travel to a possible scenario ('in the future, I will reflect on how my past self could have taken a different future action') and is centrally implicated in complex human decision-making. This perspective calls for further research into the mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny of recursive mental time travel, and revives the question of links with other recursive forms of thinking such as theory of mind. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.