Episodic future thinking: what is it and what is it for?

A cognitive process that allows us to hypothesize about what will happen in the future.

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 come to us, but we can imagine ourselves and how we are going to face what will appear at that moment.

This action of seeing oneself in what might happen next is called episodic future thinking and it is fundamental to our behavior. It is what allows us to orient our behavior to reach an end, and next we are going to see it more in depth.

What is episodic future thinking?

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 is considered a crucial aspect in differentiating us from other animals. in the future is considered a crucial aspect in differentiating us from other animals.

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

Which part?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It should be understood that when we speak of future episodic thinking it is not synonymous with "pure" imagination. In this process, there is not an excessive creative processRather, it is a visualization of what the future may be like, 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 vacation at the beach. For this we are imagining ourselves enjoying that well-deserved vacation, but we also imagine ourselves working the week before to get ahead on work, we imagine what we will and will not put in our backpack and what we will need while we are there. In other words, we set ourselves more or less realistic limits when it comes to imagining and experiencing the future event.

Related concepts

There are several concepts related to episodic future thinking.

Prospective memory

Prospective memory is the memory we use when remembering something with the intention of doing it in the future. That is, it is to keep in mind an action that we wish to carry out in the future with the intention of achieving a goal or objective..

For example, a use case of prospective memory would be when we have to remember to send a message to a relative or friend the next time we see him or her, or to water the plants the next time we go out to the balcony.

Three processes are involved in prospective memory:

• Developing a plan
• Remembering the plan
• Recalling at some point in the future executing the plan.

Episodic future thinking has a lot to do with prospective memory, especially when it is intended to generate a way to remember the plan. when it is intended 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 the house, we are going to leave the medicine on the kitchen table, near where the glasses are.

The reason we left the medicine on the kitchen table 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 a tiring day at work. Thus, when we arrive we will see the medicine and remember to take it.

• You may be interested in "Types of memory: how does the human brain store memories?"

Judgments and decision making.

Humans tend to be more optimistic when it comes to imagining when we are going to finish a project, especially if the project date is far off 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 aside all the details that could affect the duration of what we have to do.

People's tendency to engage in episodic future thinking, and their accuracy in making predictions about future events may also be mediated by the temporal proximity of the future event in question.

It has been shown that people represent events farther in the future more abstractly, even if the information they possess about the future event may be mediated by the temporal proximity of the future event in question.even if the information they possess about the event remains constant. It has been found that people tend to consider time constraints only when the event is closer in time.

Episodic future thinking and its development in childhood

The ability to imagine oneself in possible future situations varies with chronological age. By about the third year of life, both the ability to speak and other behavioral aspects, 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, which 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, such as "maybe" and "possibly", appear in the child's speech. These constructions about the future are not only based on the past and what the child has already experienced, but also on future projections, predictions and hypotheses.

The ability to plan for the future is increasing between the ages of 3 and 5.. For example, at this age we can ask "what do you imagine you are going to do in the park?" and the child can tell us everything he wants to do, run with other children, play in the sand, go for a walk, but not play with the swings because he is afraid of them. Thus, he tells us what he is sure, more or less, that he is going to end up doing, instead of telling us what he has done there before.

By the age of 5, the child has a better planning capacity, not only in terms of language. He is already able to prepare and make decisions for the future, and set a series of goals to achieve, although still in a much less organized way.They are more aware of the future and how they can plan for it, although still in a much less organized way than adults. They are more aware of the future and how they 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 by Walter Mischel's candy test (also called the marshmallow test). In this experiment, a candy 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 candy. From the age of 4, children prefer to wait and get double the amount rather than not control themselves and eat the marshmallow.

How does it relate to psychopathology?

Episodic future thinking has been related to clinical psychology, especially in understanding the course and concerns that understanding the course and concerns of patients with disorders such as anxiety or depression..

One thing that has turned out to be quite striking is the type of future-oriented thinking of people suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. While in the general population episodic future thinking constitutes a very important portion of cognitive activity, helping to plan for future situations, it has been found that in patients with this anxiety disorder future-oriented thinking is more unspecific and negative.

In this case it is presented 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. and general and abstract thoughts are presented, lacking concrete and specific details. Patients with generalized anxiety have a mental imagery more prone not to visualize realistic future scenarios, but to live the worry of the aversive event they imagine will happen to them.

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.