Abstract
Episodic future thinking is a projection of the self into the future to mentally preexperience an event. Previous work has shown striking similarities between autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking in response to various experimental manipulations. This has nurtured the idea of a shared neurocognitive system underlying both processes. Here, undergraduates generated autobiographical memories and future event representations in response to cue words and requests for important events and rated their characteristics. Important and wordcued events differed markedly on almost all measures. Past, as compared with future, events were rated as more sensorially vivid and less relevant to life story and identity. However, in contrast to previous work, these main effects were qualified by a number of interactions, suggesting important functional differences between the two temporal directions. For both temporal directions, sensory imagery dropped, whereas self-narrative importance and reference to normative cultural life script events increased with increasing temporal distance.
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This work was supported by the Danish National Research Foundation, as well as a collective research project grant from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities to the first author and by a postdoctoral stipend from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities to the second author.
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Berntsen, D., Bohn, A. Remembering and forecasting: The relation. Memory & Cognition 38, 265–278 (2010). https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.3.265
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.3.265