Cognitive approaches to the study of episodic future thinking

The concept of episodic future thinking—the ability to simulate events that may take place in the personal future—has given rise to an exponentially growing field of research that spans a variety of sub-disciplines within psychology and neuroscience. In this introduction to the special issue, we provide a brief historical overview of factors that have shaped research on the topic and highlight the need for additional behavioural work to uncover cognitive mechanisms that support episodic future thinking and differentiate it from other related modes of future-oriented cognition. We conclude by discussing the manner in which the various contributions to the special issue fill the gaps in our knowledge and make some of our own suggestions for future work.     

Procrastination,consideration of future consequences,and episodic future thinking

Despite the intrinsic temporal nature of procrastination, little research has examined the link between this form of self-regulatory failure and the consideration of future consequences, and no study has addressed the link between procrastination and episodic future thinking. The aim of the present study was to explore these relationships. Participants were asked to project themselves into possible future events and to rate the amount of sensory-perceptual details and autonoetic consciousness associated with their representations. They were also asked to complete questionnaires that assessed procrastination, the consideration of future consequences, and negative affect. Results showed that both the consideration of future consequences and episodic future thinking were associated with procrastination, and in particular with procrastination-related decision making abilities and procrastination-related motivational dispositions, respectively.     

Visual perspective as a two-dimensional construct in episodic future thought

Visual perspective (first-person vs. third-person) is a salient characteristic of memory and mental imagery with important cognitive and behavioural consequences. Most work on visual perspective treats it as a unidimensional construct. However, third-person perspective can have opposite effects on emotion and motivation, sometimes intensifying these and other times acting as a distancing mechanism, as in PTSD. For this reason among others, we propose that visual perspective in memory and mental imagery is best understood as varying along two dimensions: first, the degree to which first-person perspective predominates in the episodic imagery, and second, the degree to which the self is visually salient from a third-person perspective. We show that, in episodic future thinking, these are anticorrelated but non-redundant. These results further our basic understanding of the potent but divergent effects visual perspective has on emotion and motivation, both in everyday life and in psychiatric conditions.     

Emotion matters: The influence of valence on episodic future thinking in young and older adults

In young adults, valence not only alters the degree to which future events are imagined in rich episodic detail, but also how memorable these events are later on. For older adults, how valence influences episodic detail generation while imagining future events, or recalling these details at another time, remains unclear. We investigated the effect of valence on the specificity and memorability of episodic future thinking (EFT) in young and older adults. Among young and older adults, negative EFT was accompanied by less episodic detail generation relative to positive and neutral EFT. A similar reduction in episodic specificity for negative EFT was found two days later when participants recalled their previously imagined events. Notably, while older adults generated less episodically specific future thoughts relative to young adults, age did not influence the effect of valence on episodic detail generation at imagination or recollection.     

Divergent thinking and constructing episodic simulations

Divergent thinking likely plays an important role in simulating autobiographical events. We investigated whether divergent thinking is differentially associated with the ability to construct detailed imagined future and imagined past events as opposed to recalling past events. We also examined whether age differences in divergent thinking might underlie the reduced episodic detail generated by older adults. The richness of episodic detail comprising autobiographical events in young and older adults was assessed using the Autobiographical Interview. Divergent thinking abilities were measured using the Alternative Uses Task. Divergent thinking was significantly associated with the amount of episodic detail for imagined future events. Moreover, while age was significantly associated with imagined episodic detail, this effect was strongly related to age-related changes in episodic retrieval rather than divergent thinking.     

Episodic future thinking: Linking neuropsychological performance with episodic detail in young and old adults

Episodic future thinking (EFT) has been linked with our ability to remember past events. However, its specific neurocognitive subprocesses have remained elusive. In Experiment 1, a study of healthy older adults was conducted to investigate the candidate subprocesses of EFT. Participants completed a standard EFT cue word task, two memory measures (Verbal Paired Associates I, Source Memory), and two measures of executive function (Trail Making Test, Tower Test). In Experiment 2, healthy young adults also completed an EFT task and neuropsychological measures. The link between neurocognitive measures and five characteristics of EFT was investigated. Specifically, it was found that Source Memory and Trail Making Test performance predicted the episodic specificity of future events in older but not younger adults. Replicating previous findings, older adults produced future events with greater semantic but fewer episodic details than did young adults. These results extend the data and emphasize the importance of the multiple subprocesses underlying EFT.     

Mental time travel: Effects of trial duration on episodic and semantic content

Studies exploring mental time travel commonly use cue-word paradigms to elicit past and future autobiographical events. However, the effect of trial duration (how long participants are allowed to describe events) on the relationship between episodic and nonepisodic detail and episodic specificity (i.e., whether longer durations increase event specificity) has not been examined. To resolve these issues, a cue-word study was devised whereby participants described past and future events under three randomly administered time constraints: short (1-min), standard (3-min), and long (5-min) durations. Findings indicated that an individual's capacity for episodic and nonepisodic thought for the past and future were unrelated. This lends supports to the idea that independent mechanisms are responsible for episodic and semantic information. This study also offers clarity concerning the effect of different trial durations on episodic specificity, which may aid the design of future studies of mental time travel.     

情节式未来思考中目标加工研究进展

情节式未来思考是个体将自我投射到未来以预先经历某事件的能力,个人目标加工在情节式未来思考中发挥着重要作用。目前对情节式未来思考中目标加工的行为学研究通常将其划分为目标过程模拟和目标结果模拟两种类型,以探究其对执行意图的影响为主;脑机制神经影像学研究则聚焦于默认网络的内侧前额叶和后扣带的重要作用,以及默认网络、额顶控制网络和奖赏区的协同作用。未来研究应进一步探讨情节式未来思考目标加工的形式、年龄差异及其与时间距离的关系。     

The relationship between prospective memory and episodic future thinking in younger and older adulthood

Episodic future thinking (EFT), the ability to project into the future to “preexperience” an event, and prospective memory (PM), remembering to perform an intended action, are both examples of future-oriented cognition. Recently it has been suggested that EFT might contribute to PM performance but to date few studies have examined the relationship between these two capacities. The aim of the present study was to investigate the nature and specificity of this relationship, as well as whether it varies with age. Participants were 125 younger and 125 older adults who completed measures of EFT and PM. Significant, positive correlations between EFT and PM were identified in both age groups. Furthermore, EFT ability accounted for significant unique variance in the young adults, suggesting that it may make a specific contribution to PM function. Within the older adult group, EFT did not uniquely contribute to PM, possibly indicating a reduced capacity to utilize EFT, or the use of compensatory strategies. This study is the first to provide systematic evidence for an association between variation in EFT and PM abilities in both younger and older adulthood and shows that the nature of this association varies as a function of age.     

Visual perspective in remembering and episodic future thought

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, remembering and episodic future thinking are supported by a common set of constructive processes. In the present study, we directly addressed this assertion in the context of third-person perspectives that arise during remembering and episodic future thought. Specifically, we examined the frequency with which participants remembered past events or imagined future events from third-person perspectives. We also examined the different viewpoints from which third-person perspective events were remembered or imagined. Although future events were somewhat more likely to be imagined from a third-person perspective, the spatial viewpoint distributions of third-person perspectives characterizing remembered and imagined events were highly similar. These results suggest that a similar constructive mechanism may be at work when people remember events from a perspective that could not have been experienced in the past and when they imagine events from a perspective that could not be experienced in the future. The findings are discussed in terms of their consistency with—and as extensions of—the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis.     

Eye movements across viewpoint changes in multiple object tracking

Observers can visually track multiple objects that move independently even if the scene containing the moving objects is rotated in a smooth way. Abrupt scene rotations yield tracking more difficult but not impossible. For nonrotated, stable dynamic displays, the strategy of looking at the targets' centroid has been shown to be of importance for visual tracking. But which factors determine successful visual tracking in a nonstable dynamic display? We report two eye tracking experiments that present evidence for centroid looking. Across abrupt viewpoint changes, gaze on the centroid is more stable than gaze on targets indicating a process of realigning targets as a group. Further, we show that the relative importance of centroid looking increases with object speed.     

Mental time travel into the episodic future,episodic past,and episodic counterfactual past in everyday life

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%, 22%, and 54%, respectively), is used mainly for mood regulation purposes, and the temporal distribution decreases as a function of time. We observe similarities in phenomenological detail: memories and counterfactual thoughts sharing similar ratings of sensory detail, memories and future thoughts sharing similar ratings of positivity, and counterfactual and future thoughts sharing similar ratings of mental time travel. We discuss the implications of episodic counterfactual thinking in everyday life.     

The organization of prospective thinking: Evidence of event clusters in freely generated future thoughts

Recent research suggests that many imagined future events are not represented in isolation, but instead are embedded in broader event sequences—referred to as event clusters. It remains unclear, however, whether the production of event clusters reflects the underlying organizational structure of prospective thinking or whether it is an artifact of the event-cuing task in which participants are explicitly required to provide chains of associated future events. To address this issue, the present study examined whether the occurrence of event clusters in prospective thought is apparent when people are left to think freely about events that might happen in their personal future. The results showed that the succession of events participants spontaneously produced when envisioning their future frequently included event clusters. This finding provides more compelling evidence that prospective thinking involves higher-order autobiographical knowledge structures that organize imagined events in coherent themes and sequences.     

Prevalence and determinants of direct and generative modes of production of episodic future thoughts in the word cueing paradigm

Recent research suggests that episodic future thoughts can be formed through the same dual mechanisms, direct and generative, as autobiographical memories. However, the prevalence and determinants of the direct production of future event representations remain unclear. Here, we addressed this issue by collecting self-reports of production modes, response times (RTs), and verbal protocols for the production past and future events in the word cueing paradigm. Across three experiments, we found that both past and future events were frequently reported to come directly to mind in response to the cue, and RTs confirmed that events were produced faster for direct than for generative responses. When looking at the determinants of direct responses, we found that most past and future events that were directly produced had already been thought of on a previous occasion, and the frequency of previous thoughts predicted the occurrence of direct access. The direct production of autobiographical thoughts was also more frequent for past and future events that were judged important and emotionally intense. Collectively, these findings provide novel evidence that the direct production of episodic future thoughts is frequent in the word cueing paradigm and often involves the activation of personally significant “memories of the future.”     

Eye movements and attention in reading,scene perception,and visual search

Eye movements are now widely used to investigate cognitive processes during reading, scene perception, and visual search. In this article, research on the following topics is reviewed with respect to reading: (a) the perceptual span (or span of effective vision), (b) preview benefit, (c) eye movement control, and (d) models of eye movements. Related issues with respect to eye movements during scene perception and visual search are also reviewed. It is argued that research on eye movements during reading has been somewhat advanced over research on eye movements in scene perception and visual search and that some of the paradigms developed to study reading should be more widely adopted in the study of scene perception and visual search. Research dealing with “real-world” tasks and research utilizing the visual-world paradigm are also briefly discussed.     

Eye movements can cause item-specific visual recognition advantages

Prior research suggests that spontaneous saccades localized towards blank regions of space during memory storage and recall improve memory for items at the saccade locations. In the present study, we examined whether a recognition advantage can be observed when a single, exogenously directed saccade occurs during memory maintenance. We manipulated whether participants made a saccade to an item’s previous location or maintained fixation, as well as whether tested items reappeared in their original location or not. The results of three experiments showed that visual recognition was better after a saccade to the location of a probed object than after no saccade or after a saccade to the location of a non-probed object, so long as saccades went to the to-be-tested location more often than chance. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that eye movements can elicit an item-specific recognition advantage in visual working memory.     

Discourse-mediation of the mapping between language and the visual world: Eye movements and mental representation

Two experiments explored the mapping between language and mental representations of visual scenes. In both experiments, participants viewed, for example, a scene depicting a woman, a wine glass and bottle on the floor, an empty table, and various other objects. In Experiment 1, participants concurrently heard either ‘The woman will put the glass on the table’ or ‘The woman is too lazy to put the glass on the table’. Subsequently, with the scene unchanged, participants heard that the woman ‘will pick up the bottle, and pour the wine carefully into the glass.’ Experiment 2 was identical except that the scene was removed before the onset of the spoken language. In both cases, eye movements after ‘pour’ (anticipating the glass) and at ‘glass’ reflected the language-determined position of the glass, as either on the floor, or moved onto the table, even though the concurrent (Experiment 1) or prior (Experiment 2) scene showed the glass in its unmoved position on the floor. Language-mediated eye movements thus reflect the real-time mapping of language onto dynamically updateable event-based representations of concurrently or previously seen objects (and their locations).     

人们如何设想未来：未来情景思维对个体心理和行为的影响

未来情景思维(Episodic Future Thinking, EFT)主要指人们基于当前情景或过去经历来思考、想象未来的过程, 是人们对于未来的一种设想。根据已有的行为实验和神经影像学等多个方面的研究结果, 系统论述了未来情景思维的概念和特征, 以及个体过去的生活经历及相应记忆和个体生活目标对其的影响, 通过概括和分析行为和脑神经两方面的证据来论述未来情景思维会对人们具体生活实践产生积极与消极的双向影响。当然, 未来还需要进一步加强未来情景思维研究的广度和深度, 特别是要细化未来情景思维的类型, 探讨未来情景思维可能导致的不适应行为以及影响个体心理和行为的作用机制, 从而为人们如何更积极地适应未来提供更充分的实证证据和理论构想。     

未来情景思考对目标达成的双刃作用及其机制

未来情景思考指个体想象并预先感受某个可能在未来发生的自我相关情景事件的心理加工,它对目标达成可产生双刃影响:一些思考方式会妨碍目标达成,如想象理想的结果或过程;而另一些思考方式则会促进目标达成,如过程模拟和想象较为消极的目标相关场景。对于未来情景思考是促进还是妨碍目标达成,动机水平的高低和执行意向的清晰程度可能是关键调节因素,相应的干预策略可通过增强这两者而将未来情景思考对目标达成的妨碍作用转化为促进作用。进一步的研究需系统探讨不同方式的未来情景思考影响目标达成的认知神经机制,并对目标特征和人格特点如何调节未来情景思考对目标达成的影响进行探讨。