Spreng and Levine (2006; see also Spreng and Levine, 2012) reported similarities in the temporal distributions of past and future autobiographical events provided by college students, middle-aged, and older adults. Several studies have found that the developmental trajectories of reporting and making judgments about past and future events are similar, as children become able to answer questions about their own personal past and future between the ages of three and five years (Busby and Suddendorf, 2005; Hayne and Imuta, 2011; Hudson et al., 2011; Russell et al., 2010; Suddendorf, 2010b; for review, see Suddendorf, 2010a). These findings
are complemented Baf-A1 mouse by a recent report indicating that some measures of functional connectivity within the default network in children and adolescents are related to the qualitative features of memories
and to some extent future imaginations (Østby et al., 2012). Studies using the Autobiographical Interview procedure (Levine et al., 2002) discussed earlier have documented that older adults produce fewer internal or episodic details than younger adults both when remembering the past and imagining the future, along with an increased number of external details for both remembering and imagining (Addis et al., 2008, 2010, 2011b; Gaesser et al., 2011; Sheldon et al., 2011; for review, see Schacter et al., 2012). Similarly, studies of various neurological and psychopathological populations have documented why parallel reductions in Regorafenib cell line the episodic specificity of past and future events in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (Addis et al., 2009b), mild cognitive impairment (Gamboz et al., 2010b), amnesic syndrome (Andelman et al., 2010; Hassabis et al., 2007b; Klein et al., 2002; Race et al., 2011; Tulving, 1985), depression (Williams et al., 1996), schizophrenia (D’Argembeau
et al., 2008a), autism (Lind and Bowler, 2010), and post-traumatic stress disorder (Brown et al., 2011). These converging findings have led investigators to propose theoretical ideas that emphasize the tight links between memory and simulation. For instance, Schacter and Addis (2007a, 2007b, 2009) proposed the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, which connects work on future simulation with “constructive” aspects of memory, such as memory distortions and errors, by emphasizing memory’s role in simulating future events (for related ideas, see Suddendorf and Busby, 2005; Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997). The general idea that memory is a constructive process of integrating bits and pieces of information, rather than a literal replay of the past, dates to the pioneering work of Bartlett (1932), and has been developed by a variety of investigators who have demonstrated the occurrence of memory distortions and theorized about their basis (e.g., Brainerd and Reyna, 2005; Johnson et al., 1993; Loftus, 1979, 2003; Schacter et al.