By Eric Horowitz

The dimension of time remains an unexplorable frontier and constant constraint. It always moves at the rate of second per second. The silver lining for humans is that we have an imagination that doesn’t face these limitations. We can think about next week, then jump 20 years into the past, then think about what might happen in an hour. Any moment our minds wander to another era we become mental time travelers.

Researchers are making progress in understanding such processes, and the inaugural SPSP Preconference on Subjective Time and Mental Time Travel presented a look at some answers we now have to questions about our temporal jumps. Chief among them: What do we get out of bending time?

Constantine Sedikides of Southampton University suggested that the latest research on nostalgia is providing one answer. Sedikides and his collaborators define nostalgic reverie as remembering a typically fond and personally meaningful event from one’s past. Over the years they have found evidence that people engage in nostalgic reverie in response to feelings of self-discontinuity. The nostalgia then helps induce a sense of social connectedness—after all, if you have engaged in these meaningful events you must have important relationships with others. This social connectedness then restores a sense of self-continuity, which in turn increases well-being. Those people who never throw out a ticket stub may have it all figured out.

Another reason to manipulate time was presented by Anne Wilson of Wilfrid Laurier University. Wilson discussed her continuing work on Temporal Self-Appraisal Theory, which explores how we are motivated to perceive certain events as subjectively farther or closer in time. For example, people tend to perceive a past event that paints them in a negative light as subjectively farther away than an event that paints them in positive light, even if the two events occurred at the same time. Because more recent events exert a greater influence on how people view themselves, pushing bad experiences farther into the past and pulling good experiences closer to the present helps people maintain a positive self-image.

Recent work in Wilson’s lab has extended this phenomenon to events that don’t directly involve the self. Specifically, people tend to perceive transgressions committed by members of a political party they oppose as subjectively more recent than misdeeds of members of a political party they support. Similarly, people who score high on a scale of modern racism perceive a crime committed by a black person 10 years ago to feel subjectively more recent than those lower in racism. In these instances events are being moved subjectively closer or farther in order to buttress existing beliefs.

The way we feel about an event not only changes where we place it in time, an event’s place in time can also change how we feel. Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago spoke about how the uncertainty and controllability of the future leads people to devote more emotional and cognitive resources to future events relative to past events. This has consequences for judgments of intentionality or morality—for example, when told about a soda machine that alters its price based on the temperature outside, people judged the pricing scheme to be less fair when told the machine was being tested two week in the future compared to when told it was tested two weeks ago in the past. It seems the old adage, “don’t cry over spilled milk” holds true when judging past events.

Altering how we view time can also be helpful for decision-making. In his talk, NYU’s Yaacov Trope linked Construal-Level Theory to different “temporal scopes.” Low-level construal supports a contractive temporal scope—or a focus on the present—while high-level construal supports an expansive temporal scope that allows a person to focus on a lengthy period of time. Our ability to switch between these scopes allows us to make better choices and predictions.

Northwestern’s Dan McAdams discussed a similarly abstract link between mental time travel and decision-making. McAdams’ work focuses on the importance of life narratives, and it suggests that going into the past and reconstructing autobiographical events enables us to build stories about our lives that guide future action.

Given the variety of contextual factors that can influence how we engage with time, it’s not surprising that research has found there are also individual differences. Jeff Joireman of Washington State University summarized the history of the Consideration of Future Consequences Scale (CFC), a measure that has been shown to predict financial, health, and academic behaviors. Recent work suggest that the scale consists of two factors — a focus on the present and a focus on the future — and that certain behaviors may be predicted by one factor but not the other.

Many questions about the way our minds perceive and travel through time remain, but it’s clear that these journeys are far from random. Next time you feel your mind enter the past, remember that, while it may not be as exciting as fleeing from the Libyans and saving Doc’s life, there’s a reason for it.