Memory and feeling of pastness

The aim of this paper is to provide an answer to the following question: How is it that content that is produced in the present can be attributed to the past? According to behavioral data and the active inference framework, we have developed the idea that the feeling of pastness is rooted in both an attribution process and an inference that originates from the phenomenological feeling accompanying any cognitive processing. More precisely, we propose that the feeling of pastness arises from an inference made to resolve the perception of a change in the phenomenological experience or fluency associated with the ongoing process, even when this process is not directly related to the stimulus being judged