Autonoetic and Noetic Conscious Awareness

Recent research on autonoetic consciousness indicates that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are closely related. The purpose of the present study was to confirm this proposition by examining whether the relationship observed between personality and episodic memory could be extended to episodic future thinking and, more generally, to investigate the influence of personality traits on selfinformation processing in the past and in the future. Results show that Neuroticism and Harm Avoidance predict more negative past memories and future projections. Other personality dimensions exhibit a more limited influence on mental time travel (MTT). Therefore, our study provide an additional evidence to the idea that MTT into the past and into the future rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used to envision the future.

This paper will synthesize the existing literature on episodic memory, theory of mind, and temporal representation, in the fields of philosophy of mind, neuroscience, ethology, and human developmental and evolutionary psychology. The conceptual structures and instantiations of the three faculties will be analyzed, showing that they are closely interconnected, and giving empirically supported distinctions between two forms of episodic memory, and two forms of theory of mind. The minimal requirements for the development of each form of both episodic memory and theory of mind will be determined. Delineating the conditions for the development of each form of both episodic memory and theory of mind will show that there is a dependency relationship necessitating a sequential and alternating development of the two forms of each faculty, specifically that prospective episodic memory can develop only following the advent of both retrospective episodic memory, and mind-reading, in that order, and that metacognition can only arise subsequent to prospective episodic memory. The paper will conclude with an analysis of the relationship between episodic memory, metacognition, and temporal representation, showing that temporal representation is fundamentally conditioned by the structure of episodic memory and theory of mind.

Is there a di erence between recollecting episodes from the past and recalling autobiographically? Both in the philosophical and psychological literature, it does not seem that there is a consensus on whether autobiographical memories should be considered as a metaphysically equivalent concept to episodic memories or a di erent category of memory entirely. In this article, I give reasons to believe that autobiographical memories do not relate to the recollection of past episodes since they do not have an associated subjective experience and the consequential experience of mental time travel. Autobiographical memories, I argue, are presented as a narrative that is constructed propositionally, thus di ering substantially from episodic memory in its subjective property, the reference to the self, and the content in which each one is grounded. To do so, first I use data from the psychological literature on amnesic patients as evidence for both the di erence in phenomenology and content. And second, I use insights from recent philosophical literature on memory and the self, to defend that what is referred here as "autobiographical memory" is indeed a di erent kind of memory that di ers substantially from episodic memory and slightly from semantic memory.