Episodic memory is the foundation for conscious recollection of specific personal events from one’s past and the mental projection of anticipated events into one’s subjective future (Wheeler et al., 1997). Recollection of episodic events includes autonoetic awareness, which is the feeling of re-experiencing or reliving the past and mentally traveling back in subjective time (Tulving, 2001). Sober alcoholics demonstrate a deficit of autonoetic consciousness (Le Berre et al., 2010; Pitel et al., 2007a) associated with difficulties in retrieving the spatiotemporal context of encoding, with studies reporting compromise of temporal ordering ability (e.g., putting events in chronological order) and spatial context recognition (e.g., remembering where I was when I drank too much last time) (Pitel et al., 2007a; Salmon et al., 1986; Sullivan et al., 1997).
