On the organization of episodic future thoughts in event clusters

Memory can be flexibly used to image events that might happen in one’s personal future, a capacity that has been referred to as episodic future thinking. In this talk, I will present data showing that many episodic future thoughts are not represented in isolation, but instead are part of higher-order event clusters that organize imagined events in coherent themes and causal sequences. Personal goals seem to play an important role in this organization and neuroimaging evidence shows that event clusters recruit brain regions supporting conceptual and integrative processing. These findings suggest that episodic future thinking involves the integration of specific event representations with autobiographical knowledge, which contextualizes imagined events with respect to personal goals and general expectations about one’s life.