Future episodic thought: what it is and what it is for

Human beings remember the past, live in the present and imagine the future. It is in that future that any option is possible.

The future is something that has not yet arrived, but we can imagine ourselves and how we are going to face what appears at that moment.

This action of seeing oneself in what might happen next is called episodic future thinking. and it is something fundamental in our conduct. It is what allows us to guide our behavior to reach an end, and then we will see it more thoroughly.

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What is future episodic thought?

Being able to think about the future is an integral component of human cognition. In fact this ability to imagining events that have not yet taken place, but that we see as plausible in the future it is considered a crucial aspect when it comes to differentiating ourselves from other animals.

Future episodic thought is the human ability to project our own existence to an event that has not yet occurred. It could be understood as our ability to imagine ourselves in an event that we believe is possible to occur. In essence, it is about pre-experiencing something, a future event.

From what part?

The idea of ​​future episodic thinking, originally conceptualized by Cristina M. Atance and Daniela K. O'Neill, part of Endel Tulving's idea of ​​episodic memory.

This author classified memory into two types: semantic and episodic. According to Tulving, semantic memory is one that comes to be defined, broadly, as knowledge of the world (knowing meanings, dates of historical events, data in general...). Instead episodic memory has to do with the fact of being able to remember experiences related to our person, that is, re-experiencing past events.

For example, we would talk about semantic memory if we try to remember the name of our institute, what they were called our classmates and teachers, what we saw in the biology class and what exactly Lamarck's theory was about. On the other hand, episodic memory would have to do with memories that high school brings us, when we had a fight with one of our classmates or failed an exam and the teacher scolded us.

Based on this, it can be understood that episodic memory and seeing ourselves in a future situation have a lot to do with it. It is as if we remember, but instead of doing it by looking at the past, we do it by looking at the future.

Furthermore, this same idea is based on another of Tulving's, autonoetic consciousness, which is the one that mediates the knowledge of one's own existence and identity of the individual in subjective time, extending from the personal past through the present into the future staff.

This awareness, along with the idea of ​​episodic memory, would be what would allow us to "travel to the future." We would re-experience experiences already lived but projecting them with a view to the future.

It should be understood that when we speak of future episodic thought it is not synonymous with "pure" imagination. In this process there is no excessive creative process, but a visualization of how the future can be taking into account different factors, both positive and negative, that limit and focus the future scenario that we are pre-experiencing.

To understand it better, we may be planning a beach vacation. For this we are imagining ourselves enjoying those well-deserved vacations, but we also imagine ourselves working the previous week to advance work, we imagine what we are going to put in the backpack and what we are going to need while let's be there That is, we set ourselves more or less realistic limits when imagining and experiencing the future event.

Related concepts

There are several concepts related to future episodic thinking.

prospective memory

Prospective memory is the one we use when remembering something with the intention of carrying it out in the future. That is, it is take into account an action that we want to perform in the future with the intention of achieving a goal or objective.

For example, a prospective memory use case would be when we have to remember to send a message a family member or friend the next time we see you, or water the plants the next time we go outside. balcony.

Within prospective memory, three processes are involved:

• develop a plan
• remember the plan
• Remember at some point in the future to execute the plan

Future episodic thinking has a lot to do with prospective memory, especially when trying to generate a way to remember what we have to do.

For example, suppose we have to take a medicine immediately after we get home today. To make sure that we take it, we decide that before we leave home, we are going to leave the medicine on the kitchen table, near where the glasses are.

The reason why we have left the medicine in the kitchen is not random. We have predicted what we are going to do as soon as we get home, knowing that we are going to go into the kitchen to have a snack after an exhausting day at work. Thus, when we arrive we will see the medicine and we will remember that we have to take it.

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Judgments and decision making

Human beings tend to be more optimistic when imagining when we are going to finish a project, especially if the project date appears very far in time. This has been called the planning fallacy.

One of the explanations behind this fallacy lies in the fact that we tend to base our predictions only on the future plan, ignoring or leaving out all the details that could affect the duration of what we have to do.

The tendency of people to carry out episodic future thinking, and their accuracy in doing predictions about future events may also be mediated by the temporal proximity of the future event in question.

It has been seen that people more abstractly represent events further in the future, even if the information they possess about the event remains constant. It has been seen that people tend to consider time constraints only when the event is closer in time.

Future episodic thinking and its development in childhood

The ability to imagine oneself in possible future situations varies according to chronological age. Around the third year of life, both speech ability and other aspects related to speech behavior, such as being able to prepare for an event that has not yet happened, reflect awareness of the future. It is at this age that an understanding of the future appears in the child's speech that is not limited to a simple recapitulation of the past..

The child is aware that the future is an uncertain situation, in which different things can happen. In fact, between the ages of 2 years and 2 years and 11 months, words that indicate uncertainty about the future appear in the child's speech, such as “perhaps” and “possibly”. These constructions about the future are not based only on the past and what has already lived, but on projections for the future, predictions and hypotheses.

The ability to plan for the future increases between 3 and 5 years. For example, at these ages you can ask them "what do you imagine you are going to do in the park?" and the child can tell us everything what he wants to do, run with other children, play in the sand, go for a walk but not play on the swings because they give him fear. Thus, he indicates to us what he is sure, more or less, that he is going to end up doing, instead of telling us that he has done other times there.

Looking at the age of 5, the child has a better planning capacity, not only in terms of language. is already capable of prepare and make decisions for the future, and establish a series of goals to meet, although still in a much less organized way than in adults. You are more aware of the future and how you can change it.

It has even been seen that preschool children have a certain capacity to consider the future consequences of their behavior. This has been amply exemplified with Walter Mischel's candy (also called marshmallow) test. In this experiment, a sweet is placed in front of the child and he is told that, after a while, if he has not eaten it, he will have another sweet. From the age of 4, children prefer to wait and receive double rather than not control themselves and eat the marshmallow.

What relationship does it have with psychopathology?

Future episodic thinking has been linked to clinical psychology, especially when it comes to understand the course and concerns expressed by patients with disorders such as anxiety or depression.

One thing that has gotten a lot of attention is the type of future-oriented thinking of people who suffer from generalized anxiety disorder. Although in the general population episodic future thinking constitutes a very important portion of cognitive activity, helping to plan future situations, it has been seen that in the patients of this anxiety disorder thinking with a view to the future is more non-specific and negative.

In this case it presents a preoccupation with the future that, in the context of the disorder, is analogous to rumination and general and abstract thoughts are presented, lacking concrete and specific details. Patients with generalized anxiety have a mental image that is more prone to not visualizing realistic future scenarios, but to live the worry of the aversive event that they imagine will it will happen.

Bibliographic references:

• Atance, C. M., & O'Neill, D. K. (2001). Episodic future thinking. Trends in cognitive sciences, 5(12), 533–539. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01804-0
• Wu, Jade & Szpunar, Karl & Godovich, Sheina & Schacter, Daniel & Hofmann, Stefan. (2015). Episodic Future Thinking in Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Journal of Anxiety Disorders. 36. 10.1016/j.janxdis.2015.09.005.