10

Human beings have the ability to mentally simulate specific situations that might happen in their personal future. Recent findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience show that such episodic future thought depends on the retrieval and flexible combination of information from episodic and semantic memory, which allows the mental simulation of novel events. In addition, higher-order autobiographical knowledge (such as goals and general expectations regarding the future) provides a personal context for imagined events and locates them in one's life story. These two representational components (event simulation and autobiographical context) closely interact with one another such that autobiographical knowledge contributes to the construction and organization of episodic future thoughts, as well as the subjective sense of mentally visiting one's personal future.