Main description:

One particularly adaptive feature of human cognition is the ability to mentally preview specific events before they take place in reality. Familiar examples of this ability-often referred to as episodic future thinking-include what happens when an employee imagines when, where, and how they might go about asking their boss for a raise, or when a teenager anguishes over what might happen if they ask their secret crush on a date. In this book, the editors bring together current perspectives from researchers from around the globe who are working to develop a deeper understanding of the manner in which the simulations of future events are constructed, the role of emotion and personal meaning in the context of episodic simulation, and how the ability to imagine specific future events relates to other forms of future thinking such as the ability to remember to carry out intended actions in the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Contents:

1. Cognitive approaches to the study of episodic future thinking 2. Frequency, characteristics, and perceived functions of emotional future thinking in daily life 3. The degree of disparateness of event details modulates future simulation construction, plausibility, and recall 4. Visual perspective in remembering and episodic future thought 5. Prevalence and determinants of direct and generative modes of production of episodic future thoughts in the word cueing paradigm 6. Do future thoughts reflect personal goals? Current concerns and mental time travel into the past and future 7. Remembering the past and imagining the future: Selective effects of an episodic specificity induction on detail generation 8. You'll change more than I will: Adults' predictions about their own and others' future preferences 9. The relationship between prospective memory and episodic future thinking in younger and older adulthood 10. Scripts and information units in future planning: Interactions between a past and a future planning task 11. Thinking about the future can cause forgetting of the past 12. Retrieval-induced forgetting is associated with increased positivity when imagining the future 13. Understanding deliberate practice in preschool-aged children 14. Autonoetic consciousness: Reconsidering the role of episodic memory in future-oriented self-projection