Department of Psychology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Mem Cognit. 2010 Apr;38(3):265-78. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.3.265.
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 word-cued 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.
情景式未来思维是一种将自我投射到未来，在心理上预先体验事件的过程。先前的研究表明，在各种实验操作的影响下，自传体记忆和情景式未来思维之间存在惊人的相似之处。这就孕育了一个观点，即这两个过程背后有一个共同的神经认知系统。在这里，大学生们根据提示词和重要事件的请求生成自传体记忆和未来事件的表象，并对其特征进行评分。重要事件和与词相关的事件在几乎所有方面都有明显的不同。与未来事件相比，过去的事件被认为更具有感官上的生动性，与生活故事和身份的相关性较低。然而，与之前的工作不同，这些主要效应受到了一些交互作用的限制，这表明这两个时间方向之间存在着重要的功能差异。对于这两个时间方向，感觉意象都有所下降，而自我叙述的重要性和对规范文化生活脚本事件的提及则随着时间距离的增加而增加。
