Mental Time Travel

Episodic memory has often been viewed as being fundamentally of the past, as being dependent on the transmission of content from the past, and, insofar as it preserves a certain kind of knowledge, as being for the past. The mental time travel paradigm in psychology, which provides an influential model of the relationships between capacities including episodic memory, episodic future thought, and episodic counterfactual thought, has encouraged researchers in multiple disciplines to reconsider these views. Driven by evidence concerning the overlapping brain regions that they engage, the mental time travel paradigm treats these capacities as expressions of a single underlying system, suggesting that memory may have as much to do with the future as it does with the past.