Investigating the representational structure of episodic simulation: a behavioral, neuro-cognitive, and developmental approach.

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The human mind has the astonishing ability to effortlessly leave the present moment. We can seemingly freely 'travel' to places we have never visited and times we have never lived through. How does the human cognitive system achieve this feat? An increasing amount of evidence from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that the different ways in which we can mentally travel away from the here and now rely on one integrated cognitive mechanism: episodic simulation. In order to establish this concept, most research in this domain has focused on the similarities between different kinds of "mental travel". This, however, has left largely unexplained what allows episodic simulation to produce so many different kinds of mental event simulations. We can, after all, imagine the future and the past; imagine actual and possible events. The proposed project seeks to therefore investigate this question: what cognitive mechanisms underly the representational structure of different kinds of episodic simulation? To do so, I will use tools from cognitive psychology, cognitive aging research, and cognitive neuroscience. First, Study 1 will investigate how episodic simulations of the future and the past cognitive achieve their 'tense' (i.e. their place in subjective time). Next, Study 2 will seek to determine to whether this 'tense' is cognitively determined independently of other features of a given simulation (such as whether it is 'remembered' or 'imagined'). In order to investigate to what extent the cognitive machinery allowing us to distinguish different kinds of simulations from each other changes with age, Study 3 will replicate these findings in a population of healthy older adults. Finally, Study 4, will use functional neuroimaging (fMRI) together with multi-variate pattern similarity analysis to examine the neural implementation of the representational structure of episodic simulations. As a result, this project promises to contribute to an answer to the question of how a single neurocognitive mechanism allows us to leave the present in so many different directions.