'Flashforward' mental imagery in adolescents: exploring developmental differences and associations with mental health.

BACKGROUND: Future events can spring to mind unbidden in the form of involuntary mental images also known as 'flashforwards', which are deemed important for understanding and treating emotional distress. However, there has been little exploration of this form of imagery in youth, and even less so in those with high psychopathology vulnerabilities (e.g. due to developmental differences associated with neurodiversity or maltreatment). AIMS: We aimed to test whether flashforwards are heightened (e.g. more frequent and emotional) in autistic and maltreatment-exposed adolescents relative to typically developing adolescents. We also explored their associations with anxiety/depression symptoms. METHOD: A survey including measures of flashforward imagery and mental health was completed by a group of adolescents (n=87) aged 10-16 (and one of their caregivers) who met one of the following criteria: (i) had a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder; (ii) a history of maltreatment; or (ii) no autism/maltreatment. RESULTS: Flashforwards (i) were often of positive events and related to career, education and/or learning; with phenomenological properties (e.g. frequency and emotionality) that were (ii) not significantly different between groups; but nevertheless (iii) associated with symptoms of anxiety across groups (particularly for imagery emotionality), even after accounting for general trait (non-future) imagery vividness. CONCLUSIONS: As a modifiable cognitive risk factor, flashforward imagery warrants further consideration for understanding and improving mental health in young people. This implication may extend to range of developmental backgrounds, including autism and maltreatment.

Specificity of Episodic Future Thinking in Adolescents: Comparing Childhood Maltreatment, Autism Spectrum, and Typical Development.

Maltreatment and autism can be associated with overlapping difficulties across functional domains (e.g., social, emotional, and sensory) and high rates of mental health problems. A cognitive approach focussing on affect-laden cognition, here on episodic future thinking (FT), could help inform cognitive assessments and adapt psychological interventions. Three groups of adolescents (N = 85), (i) maltreatment (n = 28), (ii) autism (n = 29), and (iii) typical development without maltreatment/autism (TD; n = 28), matched in age (10-16 years old), sex (assigned at birth), and socioeconomic status, completed a newly adapted online Autobiographical Future Thinking Test. As predicted, the maltreatment group generated significantly fewer specific future events relative to the TD group, however, the number of specific future events did not significantly differ between the autism and the other groups. Exploratory analyses showed that lower FT specificity was significantly associated with more depressive (but not anxiety) symptoms across the three groups. These findings shed light on the cognitive profiles of both maltreatment and autism during adolescence and signal FT as a potential therapeutic target for adolescents with these developmental differences. Our study lays the foundation for additional comparisons of maltreatment-related presentations versus autism with improved designs and a broader set of cognitive and clinical domains.

On second thoughts: Testing the underlying mechanisms of spontaneous future thought.

The human capacity to imagine possible future events unintentionally, with minimal cognitive effort, is termed spontaneous future thought (SFT). This paper addresses an important theoretical question for cognitive science: What are the possible cognitive mechanisms underlying such SFT experiences? We contrasted three hypotheses present in the literature: the online construction hypothesis, the recasting hypothesis, and the memories of future thoughts hypothesis. Study 1 (N = 41) used novel subjective ratings which challenged the recasting mechanism: SFTs were mostly rated as dissimilar to autobiographical memories, suggesting they are not simply past experiences 'recast' as future events. Study 2 (N = 90) used a novel experimental paradigm, comparing effects of voluntary episodic future constructions and non-personal narratives upon subsequent spontaneous thought sampling. Results suggested that voluntary future constructions remain accessible to spontaneous retrieval, supporting the memories of future thoughts hypothesis. This finding, and other data presented across the two studies, still indicates a role for online construction processes in SFT, but further empirical work is needed to clarify how and when constructive processes are engaged in SFT. Taken together, these two studies represent initial efforts to elucidate the mechanisms underlying SFT, providing the first proof-of-principle that deliberately envisioned future events can reappear, without intention, in consciousness at some later time, and further supporting the dual process account of future thinking. These methods and findings provide a firm basis for subsequent experimental and longitudinal research on SFT.

Integrity of autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking in older adults varies with cognitive functioning.

Research has documented changes in autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, cognitive decline occurs gradually and recent findings suggest that subtle alterations in autobiographical cognition may be evident earlier in the trajectory towards dementia, before AD-related symptoms emerge or a clinical diagnosis has been given. The current study used the Autobiographical Interview to examine the episodic and semantic content of autobiographical past and future events generated by older adults (N = 38) of varying cognitive functioning who were grouped into High (N = 20) and Low Cognition (N = 18) groups based on their Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores. Participants described 12 past and 12 future autobiographical events, and transcripts were scored to quantify the numbers of internal (episodic) or external (non-episodic, including semantic) details. Although the Low Cognition group exhibited a differential reduction for internal details comprising both past and future events, they did not show the expected overproduction of external details relative to the High Cognition group. Multilevel modelling demonstrated that on trials lower in episodic content, semantic content was significantly increased in both groups. Although suggestive of a compensatory mechanism, the magnitude of this inverse relationship did not differ across groups or interact with MoCA scores. This finding indicates that external detail production may be underpinned by mechanisms not affected by cognitive decline, such as narrative style and the ability to contextualize one's past and future events in relation to broader autobiographical knowledge.

Characterizing Features of Creative Writing in Older Adults.

OBJECTIVES: How does creative expression change across the life span? Although creativity is generally preserved well into adulthood, certain cognitive functions, such as episodic detail and ideational fluency, have been shown to decline with age. The present study employs computational linguistic analyses to investigate the salient features of creative writing in older adults. METHODS: We collected short stories from a sample of 50 older adults (age 65≤) which were subsequently rated for creativity by an independent set of participants. Mixed-effects linear regression models were used to describe semantic diversity and perceptual details as predictors of creativity. Semantic diversity reflects the extent to which a narrative connects divergent ideas and is closely associated with creativity. Perceptual details, characterized by sensorial descriptions, have been previously associated with creative writing and may serve to transport readers to alternative times and places. Additionally, we compare these measures to a previously collected sample of stories from younger adults. RESULTS: Results indicate that the presence of perceptual details and semantic diversity were significant positive predictors of creativity (p < .05). Moreover, we find that stories written by older adults contain fewer perceptual details compared with stories written by younger adults. DISCUSSION: These results advance our understanding of age-related changes in creativity and highlight the potential role of episodic simulation in writing creative short stories.

Peering into the future: Eye movements predict neural repetition effects during episodic simulation.

Imagining future scenarios involves recombining different elements of past experiences into a coherent event, a process broadly supported by the brain's default network. Prior work suggests that distinct brain regions may contribute to the inclusion of different simulation features. Here we examine how activity in these brain regions relates to the vividness of future simulations. Thirty-four healthy young adults imagined future events with familiar people and locations in a two-part study involving a repetition suppression paradigm. First, participants imagined events while their eyes were tracked during a behavioral session. Immediately after, participants imagined events during MRI scanning. The events to be imagined were manipulated such that some were identical to those imagined in the behavioral session while others involved new locations, new people, or both. In this way, we could examine how self-report ratings and eye movements predict brain activity during simulation along with specific simulation features. Vividness ratings were negatively correlated with eye movements, in contrast to an often-observed positive relationship with past recollection. Moreover, fewer eye movements predicted greater involvement of the hippocampus during simulation, an effect specific to location features. Our findings suggest that eye movements may facilitate scene construction for future thinking, lending support to frameworks that spatial information forms the foundation of episodic simulation.

Time spent imagining does not influence younger and older adults' episodic simulation of helping behavior.

Shared cognitive processes underlie our ability to remember the past (i.e., episodic memory) and imagine the future (i.e., episodic simulation) and age-related declines in episodic memory are also noted when simulating future scenarios. Given older adults' reduced cognitive control and protracted memory retrieval time, we examined whether imposing time limits on episodic simulation of future helping scenarios affects younger and older adults' willingness to help, phenomenological experience, and the type of details produced. Relative to a control task, episodic simulation increased younger and older participants' willingness to help, scene vividness, and perspective-taking regardless of the time spent imagining future helping scenarios. Notably, time spent imagining influenced the number, but not proportion of internal details produced, suggesting that participants' use of episodic-like information remained consistent regardless of the time they spent imagining. The present findings highlight the importance of collecting phenomenological experience when assessing episodic simulation abilities across the lifespan.

Can the prosocial benefits of episodic simulation transfer to different people and situational contexts?

Previous research has found that episodic simulation of events of helping others can effectively enhance intentions to help the same person involved and the identical situational context as the imagined scenarios. This 'prosocial simulation effect' is argued to reflect, at least in part, associative memory mechanisms whereby the simulation is reactivated when in the same situation as that imagined. However, to date, no study has examined systematically whether this 'prosocial simulation effect' can be transferred to response scenarios involving different people and/or situational contexts to the imagined scenarios, and if so, whether the degree of overlap with the imagined helping episode modulated the transfer effect. Across two experiments, we systematically varied the overlap of the simulated and response scenarios, both in terms of the persons in need and/or the situational contexts, and whether would influence the magnitude of prosocial simulation effect. Results from both experiments showed that the prosocial simulation effect can be transferred to response scenarios involving different people and situational contexts to the simulated scenarios. However, this finding was primarily driven by response scenarios that had a high degree of overlap to the simulated scenarios. The application of our findings to the practical implementation of simulation to promote prosociality in the real world is discussed.

Visualizing Compassion: Episodic Simulation as Contemplative Practice.

Contemplative interventions designed to cultivate compassion are receiving increasing empirical attention. Accumulating evidence suggests that these interventions bolster prosocial motivation and warmth towards others. Less is known about how these practices impact compassion in everyday life. Here we consider one mechanistic pathway through which compassion practices may impact perception and action in the world: simulation. Evidence suggests that vividly imagining a situation simulates that experience in the brain as if it were, to a degree, actually happening. Thus, we hypothesize that simulation during imagery-based contemplative practices can construct sensorimotor patterns in the brain that prime an individual to act compassionately in the world. We first present evidence across multiple literatures in Psychology that motivates this hypothesis, including the neuroscience of mental imagery and the emerging literature on prosocial episodic simulation. Then, we examine the specific contemplative practices in compassion-based interventions that may construct such simulations. We conclude with future directions for investigating how compassion-based interventions may shape prosocial perception and action in everyday life.

Episodic simulation of helping behavior in younger and older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Imagining helping a person in need increases one's willingness to help beyond levels evoked by passively reading the same stories. We examined whether episodic simulation can increase younger and older adults' willingness to help in novel scenarios posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 3 studies we demonstrate that episodic simulation of helping behavior increases younger and older adults' willingness to help during both everyday and COVID-related scenarios. Moreover, we show that imagining helping increases emotional concern, scene imagery, and theory of mind, which in turn relate to increased willingness to help. Studies 2 and 3 also showed that people produce more internal, episodic-like details when imagining everyday compared to COVID-related scenarios, suggesting that people are less able to draw on prior experiences when simulating such novel events. These findings suggest that encouraging engagement with stories of people in need by imagining helping can increase willingness to help during the pandemic.

How Imagination and Memory Shape the Moral Mind.

Interdisciplinary research has proposed a multifaceted view of human cognition and morality, establishing that inputs from multiple cognitive and affective processes guide moral decisions. However, extant work on moral cognition has largely overlooked the contributions of episodic representation. The ability to remember or imagine a specific moment in time plays a broadly influential role in cognition and behavior. Yet, existing research has only begun exploring the influence of episodic representation on moral cognition. Here, we evaluate the theoretical connections between episodic representation and moral cognition, review emerging empirical work revealing how episodic representation affects moral decision-making, and conclude by highlighting gaps in the literature and open questions. We argue that a comprehensive model of moral cognition will require including the episodic memory system, further delineating its direct influence on moral thought, and better understanding its interactions with other mental processes to fundamentally shape our sense of right and wrong.

Episodic representation: A mental models account.

This paper offers a modeling account of episodic representation. I argue that the episodic system constructs mental models: representations that preserve the spatiotemporal structure of represented domains. In prototypical cases, these domains are events: occurrences taken by subjects to have characteristic structures, dynamics and relatively determinate beginnings and ends. Due to their simplicity and manipulability, mental event models can be used in a variety of cognitive contexts: in remembering the personal past, but also in future-oriented and counterfactual imagination. As structural representations, they allow surrogative reasoning, supporting inferences about their constituents which can be used in reasoning about the represented events.

Does Episodic Retrieval Contribute to Creative Writing? An Exploratory Study.

Previous research indicates that episodic retrieval contributes to divergent creative thinking. However, this research has relied on standard laboratory tests of divergent creative thinking, such as generating creative uses for objects; it is unknown whether episodic retrieval also contributes to domain-specific forms of creativity. Here we start to explore whether episodic retrieval contributes to content generation on one such domain-specific task: creative writing. In two experiments, we use an episodic specificity induction (ESI) that selectively impacts tasks that draw on episodic retrieval. If episodic retrieval contributes to content generation during creative writing, then ESI should selectively increase the number of episodic details that people subsequently generate on a creative writing task. In our first experiment, we found evidence that ESI increased the number of episodic details participants generated. We observed a similar, though non-significant, trend in the second experiment. These findings constitute a starting point for examining the contribution of episodic retrieval to creative writing, but additional studies will be needed to more definitively characterize the nature and extent of these contributions.

Simulation-based learning influences real-life attitudes.

Humans can vividly simulate hypothetical experiences. This ability draws on our memories (e.g., of familiar people and locations) to construct imaginings that resemble real-life events (e.g., of meeting a person at a location). Here, we examine the hypothesis that we also learn from such simulated episodes much like from actual experiences. Specifically, we show that the mere simulation of meeting a familiar person (unconditioned stimulus; US) at a known location (conditioned stimulus; CS) changes how people value the location. We provide key evidence that this simulation-based learning strengthens pre-existing CS-US associations and that it leads to a transfer of valence from the US to the CS. The data thus highlight a mechanism by which we learn from simulated experiences.

Memories with a blind mind: Remembering the past and imagining the future with aphantasia.

Our capacity to re-experience the past and simulate the future is thought to depend heavily on visual imagery, which allows us to construct complex sensory representations in the absence of sensory stimulation. There are large individual differences in visual imagery ability, but their impact on autobiographical memory and future prospection remains poorly understood. Research in this field assumes the normative use of visual imagery as a cognitive tool to simulate the past and future, however some individuals lack the ability to visualise altogether (a condition termed "aphantasia"). Aphantasia represents a rare and naturally occurring knock-out model for examining the role of visual imagery in episodic memory recall. Here, we assessed individuals with aphantasia on an adapted form of the Autobiographical Interview, a behavioural measure of the specificity and richness of episodic details underpinning the memory of events. Aphantasic participants generated significantly fewer episodic details than controls for both past and future events. This effect was most pronounced for novel future events, driven by selective reductions in visual detail retrieval, accompanied by comparatively reduced ratings of the phenomenological richness of simulated events, and paralleled by quantitative linguistic markers of reduced perceptual language use in aphantasic participants compared to those with visual imagery. Our findings represent the first systematic evidence (using combined objective and subjective data streams) that aphantasia is associated with a diminished ability to re-experience the past and simulate the future, indicating that visual imagery is an important cognitive tool for the dynamic retrieval and recombination of episodic details during mental simulation.

The role of episodic simulation in motivating commonplace harms.

Every day, people face choices which could produce negative outcomes for others, and understanding these decisions is a major aim of social psychology. Here, we show that episodic simulation - a key psychological process implicated in other types of social and moral decision-making - can play a surprising role. Across six experiments, we find that imagining performing actions which adversely affect others makes people report a higher likelihood of performing those actions in the future. This effect happens, in part, because when people construe the actions as morally justified (as they often do spontaneously), imagining doing it makes them feel good. These findings stand in contrast to traditional accounts of harm aversion in moral psychology, and instead contribute to a growing body of evidence that people often cast harming others in a positive light.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: How temporal are episodic contents?

A prominent feature of mental event (i.e. 'episodic') simulations is their temporal orientation: human adults can generate episodic representations directed towards the past or the future. Here, we investigated how the temporal orientation of imagined events relates to the contents of these events. Is there something intrinsically temporal about episodic contents? Or does their temporality rely on a distinct set of representations? In three experiments (N = 360), we asked participants to generate and later recall a series of imagined events differing in (1) location, (2) time of day, (3) temporal orientation, and (4) weekday. We then tested to what extent successful recall of episodic content (i.e. (1) and (2)) would predict recall of temporality and/or weekday information. Results showed that recall of temporal orientation was only weakly predicted by recall of episodic contents. Nonetheless, temporal orientation was more strongly predicted by content recall than weekday recall. This finding suggests that episodic simulations are unlikely to be intrinsically temporal in nature. Instead, similar to other forms of temporal information, temporal orientation might be determined from such contents by reconstructive post-retrieval processes. These results have implications for how the human ability to 'mentally travel' in time is cognitively implemented.

Mental imagery-based episodic simulation amplifies motivation and behavioural engagement in planned reward activities.

Preliminary evidence suggests mental imagery-based episodic simulation of planned reward activities may amplify motivation and promote greater behavioural engagement, particularly for activities with high motivational barriers (Renner, Murphy, Ji, Manly, & Holmes, 2019). This study conducted a conceptual replication and extension of Renner et al. (2019). N = 81 first-year university students self-selected and scheduled two reward activities (one hedonic, one mastery) for the following week before being randomly allocated to either an Imagery-Experiential elaboration condition (n = 27), a Verbal-Reasoning elaboration condition (n = 28), or a Scheduling-only Control condition (n = 26). Following the lab session, all participants received standardized daily prompts to complete daily activity diaries online for seven days. The Imagery-Experiential condition reported greater increases in anticipatory pleasure (state mood), anticipated pleasure, and self-reported motivation compared to the Scheduling-only Control condition, and greater increases in anticipatory pleasure (state mood), but not anticipated pleasure or motivation, relative to the Verbal-Reasoning condition. Consistent with Renner et al. (2019), the Imagery-Experiential condition, but not the Verbal-Reasoning condition, reported more frequent engagement in high motivational barrier activities than the Scheduling-only Control condition. Exploratory mediational analyses suggested that mental imagery may exert unique motivational impacts via its impact on anticipatory pleasure (state mood), although indirect effects were only observed for self-reported motivation change in the lab, with real world behavioural effects falling short of statistical significance.

Post-retrieval Distortions of Self-Referential Negative Memory: Valence Consistency Enhances Gist-Directed False, While Non-negative Interference Generates More Intrusive Updates.

According to the theory of reconsolidation, the contents of an original memory can be updated after reactivation with subsequent new learnings. However, there seems to be a lack of an appropriate behavioral paradigm to study the reconsolidation of explicit self-related memory, which is of great significance to further explore its cognitive neural mechanism in the future. In two separate experiments, we adapted a trial-by-trial interfering paradigm with a self-episodic simulation process and investigated (1) whether it is possible to reconsolidate negative memories under the new behavioral paradigm and (2) how the emotional valence of post-retrieval interference material affects the reconsolidation of negative memories. The results showed that the negative memories under trial-by-trial self-simulation can be degraded and updated via post-retrieval interference processes. Individuals whose original memories were reactivated by initial background cues and who were then presented with new interference situations were less able to recall original scenes and showed more memory intrusions on these scenes than those who had experienced new learning without reactivation or only reactivation without interference. Furthermore, the extent and manner of memory change/updating were greatly influenced by the characteristics of interference information. For memories with negative valences, new learning materials with the same valence produced superior interference effects in the form of lower correct recalls and more integrated false; whereas the neutral interference materials can cause more memory intrusion. Post-retrieval memory distortions of negative self-memory may underlie different functional mechanisms.

Divergent thinking and constructing future events: dissociating old from new ideas.

Divergent thinking (the ability to generate creative ideas by combining diverse types of information) has been previously linked to the ability to imagine novel and specific future autobiographical events. Here, we examined whether divergent thinking is differentially associated with the ability to construct novel imagined future events and recast future events (i.e., actual past events recast as future events) as opposed to recalled past events. We also examined whether different types of creative ideas (i.e., old ideas from memory or new ideas from imagination) underlie the linkage between divergent thinking and various autobiographical events. Divergent thinking ability was measured using the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). In Experiment 1, the amount of episodic details for both novel and recast future events was associated with divergent thinking (AUT scores), and this relationship was significant with AUT scores for new creative ideas but not old creative ideas. There was no significant relationship between divergent thinking and the amount of episodic detail for recalled past events. We extended these findings in Experiment 2 to a different test of divergent thinking, the Consequences Task. These results demonstrate that individual differences in divergent thinking are associated with the capacity to both imagine and recast future events.