Dear BERGers,

Happy new week!

Lovely to see so many of you on Wednesday - what a fabulous mix of people we have!

This week (Wednesday 25th September) we have the fabulous Gema giving a talk on mental time travel. This is a rehearsal for a talk she will be giving as part of a European Research Council grant competition and would really appreciate the opportunity to practice this in front of a live audience with questions at the end. It would be really nice if as many of us as possible could attend to help her out. Plus, mental time travel sounds rather intriguing! An short abstract of Gema's talk is provided at the end of this email.

A quick reminder that meetings are held in the Psychology department common room (3A94) at 5:30pm with drinks and nibbles provided

The most up to date schedule is available on Box for details of talks and for information on dates where BERG is not running (here:https://stir.box.com/s/skboejxqbtg8b52aiadnzi07tv0nrsog).

If you have new students who might wish to be on the BERG mailing list, please send them this e-mail. To sign up to the BERG mailing list please use the following link: http://lists.stir.ac.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/berg (you can also use this link to unsubscribe).

Looking forward to seeing you all on Wednesday!

Best wishes,

Jade

It is about time: Uncovering the temporal mechanisms underlying human mental time travel. 

Mental time travel is the ability that allows humans to mentally project themselves backwards in time to remember past events (i.e., episodic memory) or forwards in time to imagine future events (i.e., future thinking). Despite empirical evidence showing that animals might possess mental time travel abilities, some still claim that this ability is uniquely human. Recent debates have suggested that it is the temporal component that makes mental time travel uniquely human. Advances in the field have been constrained by a lack of comparative data, methodological shortcomings that prevent meaningful comparisons, and a lack of clear conceptualizations of the temporal component. My talk will present a research project on which a novel comparative approach to study of mental time travel will be suggested.