Yes, autonoetic consciousness is primarily associated with episodic memory. Autonoetic consciousness refers to the ability of individuals to mentally travel back in time to re-experience past events, to mentally project themselves into future events, and to reflect upon their own thoughts and experiences. This type of consciousness is intimately linked with episodic memory, which is the memory system responsible for encoding, storing, and retrieving personally experienced events or episodes, including contextual details and the subjective sense of time.
Episodic memory allows individuals to remember specific past events along with the associated emotions, thoughts, and sensory-perceptual details. Autonoetic consciousness enables individuals to engage in mental time travel, mentally re-experiencing past events from a first-person perspective, and projecting themselves into hypothetical future scenarios. This capacity for self-awareness and mental time travel is thought to be unique to humans and is closely tied to the development and functioning of the episodic memory system.
