Episodic Future Thought: An Emerging Concept

摘要

The ability to mentally simulate hypothetical scenarios is a rapidly growing area of research in both psychology and neuroscience.Episodic future thought, or the ability to simulate specific personal episodes that may potentially occur in the future, represents onefacet of this general capacity that continues to garner a considerable amount of interest. The purpose of this article is to elucidatecurrent knowledge and identify a number of unresolved issues regarding this specific mental ability. In particular, this articlefocuses on recent research findings from neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and clinical psychology that have demonstrated aclose relation between episodic future thought and the ability to remember personal episodes from one's past. On the otherhand, considerations of the role of abstracted (semantic) representations in episodic future thought have been noticeablyabsent in the literature. The final section of this article proposes that both episodic and semantic memory play an importantrole in the construction of episodic future thoughts and that their interaction in this process may be determined by therelative accessibility of information in memory.