Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One 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 might be formalised 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, emphasising a bounded (rather than unbounded) role of recursion in supporting 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 implicated in complex human decision-making. This perspective calls for further research into the nature and origins of recursive mental time travel.