On the Role of Personal Semantic Memory and Temporal Distance in Episodic Future Thinking: The TEDIFT Model

In the last two decades, the study of memory processes has been expanded to encompass theprocesses involved in foreseeing events in the future dimension. The mental time travel is a mentalability, which allows individuals not only to go back in time but also to foresee specific future events(Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997).The ability to project the self forward in time to pre-experience personal events is referred to asepisodic future thinking (EFT) (Atance and O’Neill, 2001). This capacity has a strong adaptive andsocial value (Tulving, 2002; D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2012). While evidence is accruingregarding the existence of semantic general forms of prospection (Klein, 2013; Irish et al., 2016),it seems relevant to envisage the role of personal semantic representations in prospection. Herewe focus on the impact of personal semantics depending on temporal distance in episodic forms offoresight. In what follows we (I) give a brief overview of different EFT accounts, (II) discuss the roleof personal semantics in EFT, (III) propose a neurocognitive model, in which the role of personalsemantic information in EFT is defined as a function of temporal distance, (IV) speculate abouttemporally graded EFT deficits in Alzheimer’s disease and semantic dementi