Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

A function of memory that has been overlooked until recently concerns its role in allowing individuals to imagine or simulate possible future events. However, a growing number of recent studies show that imagining possible future events depends on much of the same cognitive and neural machinery as does remembering past events. This linkage has potentially important implications for understanding decision-making and performance under stress, which may impair the ability to make use of past experiences to simulate or predict upcoming events. This article considers recent neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and cognitive studies that reveal shared processes underlying remembering the past and imagining the future.