The term was coined by Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis,[1] building on Endel Tulving's work on episodic memory.
[26] Mental time travel may be one of several processes enabled by a general scenario building or construction system in the brain.
[22][27][28] This general capacity to generate and reflect on mental scenarios has been compared to a theatre in the mind that depends on the working together of a host of components.
[13] Investigations have been conducted into diverse aspects of mental time travel, including individual differences relating to personality,[29] its instantiation in artificial intelligence systems,[30] and its relationship with theory of mind[31] and mind-wandering.
[26] Addis et al. conducted an fMRI study to examine neural regions mediating construction and elaboration of past and future events.
This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
[citation needed] Cabeza et al. conducted a positron emission tomography (PET) scan study on a group of human test subjects to identify the brain regions involved in temporal memory, which is based on a linear progression of events.
Perhaps the first hard evidence for the evolution of mental time travel in humans comes in the form of Acheulean bifacial handaxes associated with Homo erectus.
[55][56] These functions include predicting future emotional reactions (affective forecasting),[57] deliberate practice,[58] intertemporal choice,[59] navigation,[60] prospective memory,[61] counterfactual thinking,[62][63] and planning.
It was not a result of associative learning, that they actually chose the utensil instead of the food reward, since the scientists ran another experiment to account for that.
Even survival instinct by certain animals such as elephants, in response to imminent danger, could involve mental time travel mechanisms.
[66] Two experiments were conducted in this study, the first being an investigation of the content of the memories of apes i.e. could these animals remember when and where two types of food they were shown before are hidden.
All these findings suggest that it is not instinctive or learning predispositions that made the animals behave the way they did, but rather that they have the ability to mentally time travel.
This study also contradicts the Bischof-Kohler hypothesis by showing that some animals may mentally time travel into the future or back to the past.
[70] A carefully controlled study found that four-year-olds could already remember a specific problem they saw in a different room sufficiently enough to prepare for its future solution.
Episodic memory is typically measured in human adults by asking people to report or describe past events that they had experienced.