Highlights•Research on episodic future thinking has increased dramatically during the past
decade.•Cognitive studies have begun to separate the contributions of episodic retrieval …

People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think “if only” or
“what if” and imagine how the past could have been different. The mind computes …

Prospection—the ability to represent what might happen in the future—is a broad concept
that has been used to characterize a wide variety of future-oriented cognitions, including …

Active inference is an approach to understanding behaviour that rests upon the idea that the
brain uses an internal generative model to predict incoming sensory data. The fit between …

Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and
psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential, autonoetic character …

It has been suggested that the simulation of hypothetical episodes and the recollection of
past episodes are supported by fundamentally the same set of brain regions. The present …

Abstract Thinking about what might have been—counterfactual thinking—is a common
feature of the mental landscape. Key questions about counterfactual thinking center on why …

Humans often represent and reason about unrealized possible actions–the vast infinity of
things that were not (or have not yet been) chosen. This capacity is central to the most …

The capacity for representing and reasoning over sets of possibilities, or modal cognition,
supports diverse kinds of high-level judgments: causal reasoning, moral judgment …

Episodic future thinking (EFT) denotes our capacity to imagine prospective events. It has
been suggested to promote farsighted decisions that entail a trade-off between short-term …