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Janie Busby, "Mental time travel: An evolutionary psychology approach to progress" To recognise progress we must be able to compare two mental representations, one of the past state, and one of the current or predicted future state. For evolutionary and developmental psychology, the question becomes how have humans developed the capacity to mentally construct each of these representations, hold them concurrently in mind, and more importantly, combine them together to form a coherent representation of change through time. Recently a number of authors (Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997; Wheeler, Stuss & Tulving, 1997) have begun to discuss the ability to mentally travel through time, to relive past experiences (episodic memory) and project oneself into hypothesised future events. This paper discusses human understanding of time, our ability to move throughout time to make comparisons of the past, present and predicted future. It introduces current theories on whether humans alone are able to conceive of time, and presents a number of studies from non-human primate and animal literature. Data from the author's first two studies into the development of the understanding of time in children will also be presented. These studies investigated the maturity of various aspects of memory and the development of planning for non-current future states. The implications of these and other findings are then applied to the more general notion of human appreciation of progress. Biography: I am a PhD student at the School of Psychology, UQ. My PhD is in evolutionary and developmental cognitive psychology, and I'm interested in the development of the understanding of time, specifically the ability to mentally travel through time, in early childhood, and the application of this theory to non-human species. |
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