Thinking about the future can take numerous forms, varying from planning actions to
foreseeing possible scenarios by means of knowledge and informed guesses, or
speculations and intuitions, or imagination and creativity. Different cognitive
processes are needed for each of these different types of future thinking. This thesis
encompasses a series of experiments both on healthy volunteers and on brain
damaged patients, revolving around the issue of “Future Thinking” (FT) that is the
cognitive ability, specifically human, of envisaging one’s own future. The concept of
FT and the relevant literature are presented and discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.
The ability to foresee has been normally assumed to rely on the reconstructive nature
of episodic memory. This hypothesis is investigated in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. In these
chapters data on young adults, who mentally pre-experienced autobiographical
episodes, are presented to investigate which type of cue would elicit richer
visualizations and to explore possible differences between temporal and a-temporal
scene construction. The findings from these experiments on healthy volunteers call
for a deeper understanding of the relationship between past experience and FT.
Chapter 7 discusses results revealing that aMCI patients produced fewer episodic but
more semantic details for both past and future events, as compared to controls,
suggesting that reminiscence and FT are the expression of the same neurocognitive
system. However, contrary to what was generally thought, data on patients with
Parkinson Disease with spared memory performance reported in Chapter 8 and 9
show that FT is not entirely dependent on memory (and the hippocampus), rather the
results suggest that poor performance in FT is associated with poor executive control.
In Chapter 10 two patients affected by dense amnesia are investigated. Chapter 11
presents a single case exhibiting florid confabulation. The results confirm that
although amnesia is associated with poor performance on FT, memory deficits
cannot account for the entire picture of FT deficits. Indeed, dysexecutive symptoms
play an important role in eliciting FT deficits