Chapter 9 moves further forward into considering students’ futures, specifically linguistically diverse students, and how teachers can support the development of ‘futures thinking’ for many contexts.

Mental time travel involves remembering personal past events (i.e., episodic memory) and thinking about future ones (i.e., future thinking). Despite empirical evidence showing that animals might be capable of mental time travel, some still remain skeptical about this issue. The aim in this chapter will be to reflect on the concept of episodic memory and future thinking as well as on the experimental approaches used in comparative psychology to study these abilities. A critical analysis of both the conceptualization of mental time travel and the experimental paradigms will be provided. I will finish by questioning the extent to which the sense of past has been addressed in this type of research and by suggesting lines of future research.

Episodic memory refers to the ability to recollect personal past events, allowing mental time travel.In contrast, semantic memory has been defined as the storage of general facts about the world. The field of comparative psychology has adopted this distinction in order to study what nonhuman animals recall about their past. The aim in this chapter is to reflect on the concept of episodic memory as well as on the experimental approaches used in comparative psychology to study this ability. A critical analysis of both the conceptualization of episodic memory and the experimental paradigms is provided.

Research concerning the relation between memory and imagination has focused increasingly on how memory contributes to imagining or simulating future and other hypothetical events. According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis (Schacter and Addis, 2007a, 2007b), episodic memory plays an important role in supporting the construction of imagined future events by allowing the retrieval and flexible recombination of elements of past experiences into simulations of possible future scenarios. Further, the hypothesis holds that the same flexible recombination processes that are useful for simulating possible future experiences can produce memory errors that result from miscombining elements of past experiences. A growing number of experimental studies during the past decade have examined various aspects of this hypothesis. Here, we consider (1) cognitive studies that have tested key elements of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis; (2) neuroimaging studies that have elucidated the neural underpinnings of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis; (3) recent experimental evidence linking flexible recombination and episodic simulation processes with memory errors; and (4) ways in which the conceptual focus of constructive episodic simulation hypothesis has changed over the past decade.

Few topics in cognitive neuroscience can be said to have spurred intense research interest and vigorous debate as much as the neurocognitive architecture of imagination. Despite the tendency to view imagination as a unitary mental faculty, its multifaceted nature implicates a diverse range of underlying processes. Episodic memory has been ascribed a foundational role in furnishing the contents of mental constructions. By contrast, semantic memory has long been overlooked in the discourse, despite converging evidence of its centrality for all forms of inner mentation. Here, I expand upon the idea that the undifferentiated and flexible nature of semantic memory renders it particularly well suited to support imagination in its many guises. The imagined scenario thus reflects the output of a dynamic process that shifts back and forth along an episodic-semantic continuum, the weighting of which hinges largely upon task demands and integrity of the underlying memory system. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to move the focus away from the traditional episodic/semantic dichotomy in favour of a unified account in which episodic and semantic processes coalesce in the service of constructive endeavors.