To date, studies exploring the relationship of counterfactual thoughts with episodic memories and episodic future thoughts have focused mainly on voluntary mental time travel. We explore mental time travel in everyday life and find that episodic counterfactual thinking occurs to a much lesser extent than thinking about the past or the future (12%,…

We investigated whether the phenomenological experience of mental time travel is similar when one travels as oneself versus with another possible self. Participants first described and rated their phenomenological experience for an autobiographical memory, a counterfactual event, and a future event (real-self condition). Then, they imagined…

Historical novels, films, and other media can disrupt or reinforce dominant narratives about the past. Educators must be careful that when they attempt to select material from a range of seemingly diverse perspectives, they do not choose content that nevertheless maintains problematic depictions of people, places, and events. Time travel stories…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with cognitive dysfunctions, including mental time travel (MTT). However, findings on diminished MTT ability may be confounded by a number of factors, including the individuals' language ability, factors related to the MTT task and the demographic factors of participants. The present study provided a…

U.S. libraries and classrooms are under siege by private and governmental entities working to simultaneously ban/remove justice-focused literature and inundate these spaces with reactionary/ultra-conservative materials. It is within this educational crisis that we conducted a critical content analysis of the award-winning, best-selling historical…

This article is concerned with Edith Nesbit's literary representation of national regeneration through a very early stage of life, childhood, in "The Story of the Amulet" (1906). For the purpose of scrutinizing how children's literature imagines regeneration in Edwardian England, I discuss the cult of nostalgia and childhood in Edwardian…

In this chapter, we examine how spatial access, the extent to which individuals must traverse space or time to reach a community college, varies by time of day across socio-demographic groups. We specifically measure spatial access as the time required to travel to a community college by public transit, a common mode of transportation for many…

People are routinely involved in remembering the national past and imagining the national future, especially when making political decisions. These processes, however, have not been explored extensively. The present research aims to address this lacuna. In 2 experiments (N = 203), participants were asked to remember and imagine events that involve…

Daydreaming is a type of mental time travel into the future. Although many cultures consider daydreaming a waste of time, the vast majority of people spend part of the day daydreaming. The age at which daydreaming is most intense is self-reported to be between 17 and 29. In this qualitative research, I wanted to find out what university students'…

For language learners who aspire to become multilingual, commitment involves a personal journey. Defining persistence as a preoccupation with goal-focused action directed to a desired future state and drawing on research from cognitive psychology and the mental time travel paradigm, this article presents an identity-based framework of persistence…

The 'See the World -- Winchester' programme was funded by the UK Turing scheme in 2021-2022 and aimed to broaden the horizons of historically marginalised students who may not otherwise have had access to extracurricular opportunities such as international travel. The purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly, the authors reflect on the…

In this article, Jessica Phillips returns to a theme explored in the Historical Association's publication "Exploring and Teaching Medieval History in Schools"--the challenge of teaching about the medieval past in ways that acknowledge its vibrant complexity and create a genuine sense of resonance rather than condescension or blank…

The motion of a bead along a path restricted to straight lines (restricted brachistochrone), sliding without friction from rest and accelerated by gravity, is considered. For two shapes of path, the geometry of the route optimized to provide the least travel time from one point to another is obtained. The bead's travel times, path lengths, and…

This manuscript is meant to support secondary school teachers in their constant effort to find novel ways to engage students. Adolescents seem particularly stimulated by time-travelling scenarios, like the famous "wormhole billiard ball paradox" proposed by J. Polchinski in 1990, which are usually solved through closed time-like curves…

The purpose of the present study was to examine primary school students' learning experiences with immersive virtual reality (I-VR). Traditional education practices are failing to inspire new cohorts of young people who have grown up with digital culture based on active participation. Given this development, the pedagogic use of I-VR systems…