Arnaud D’Argembeau
University of Liège, Belgium

Episodic future thinking—the ability to mentally simulate specific events that might happen in one’s personal future—has received much theoretical and empirical attention in recent years. Important progress has been made in understanding the representational systems supporting this ability, with current evidence showing that episodic and semantic memory provides the sources of information for constructing specific representations of possible events. It is unlikely, however, that the mental simulation of specific events is sufficient in order for the imagined episodes to be subjectively perceived as belonging to one’s personal future. In this talk, I will present behavioral and neuroimaging evidence showing that autobiographical knowledge (e.g., personal goals and general expectations about one’s life) also contributes to the construction and organization of episodic future thoughts, and enhances the subjective sense of “pre-experiencing” imagined events. These findings suggest that episodic future thinking not only involves event simulation, but also the contextualization of imagined situations within higher-order knowledge about the self and one’s life.