Synaesthesia is linked to more vivid and detailed content of autobiographical memories and less fading of childhood memories

People with synaesthesia have enhanced memory on a wide range of laboratory tests of episodic memory, but very little is known about their real-world memory. This study used a standard measure of autobiographical remembering (the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire, AMQ) considering four constructs (Recollection, Belief, Impact and Rehearsal) and two time periods (recent memories from adulthood, remote memories from childhood). Synaesthetes reported more Recollection (e.g., sensory detail) and Belief (e.g., confidence) which interacted with time, such that remote memories are reported to be comparatively better preserved in synaesthetes. This cannot be explained by synaesthetes recalling more salient episodes (the groups did not differ in Impact). It suggests instead that childhood memories have a special status in synaesthesia that reflects the different neurodevelopmental trajectory of this group. With regards to Rehearsal, controls tended to report that more recent memories tend to resurface (i.e., adulthood > childhood), but the synaesthetes showed the opposite dissociation (i.e., childhood > adulthood).     

The effect of the feeling of resolution and recognition performance on the revelation effect

The fact that engaging in a cognitive task before a recognition task increases the probability of “old” responses is known as the revelation effect. We used several cognitive tasks to examine whether the feeling of resolution, a key construct of the occurrence mechanism of the revelation effect, is related to the occurrence of the revelation effect. The results show that the revelation effect was not caused by a visual search task, which elicited the feeling of resolution, but caused by an unsolvable anagram task and an articulatory suppression task, which did not elicit the feeling of resolution. These results suggest that the revelation effect is not related to the feeling of resolution. Moreover, the revelation effect was likely to occur in participants who performed poorly on the recognition task. The result suggests that the revelation effect is inclined to occur when people depend more on familiarity than on recollection process.     

Temporal Experiences without the Specious Present

Most philosophers believe that we have experiences as of temporally extended phenomena like change, motion, and succession. Almost all theories of time consciousness explain these temporal experiences by subscribing to the doctrine of the specious present, the idea that the contents of our experiences embrace temporally extended intervals of time and are presented as temporally structured. Against these theories, I argue that the doctrine is false and present a theory that does not require the notion of a specious present. Furthermore, I argue that the different aspects of temporal experiences arise from different mechanisms operating separately. If the theory is true, then temporal experiences do not tell us anything special about the nature of consciousness and its temporal properties per se.