Imagining the personal past: Episodic counterfactuals compared to episodic memories and episodic future projections

Abstract

Episodic counterfactuals are imagined events that could have happened, but did not happen, in a person’s past. Such imagined past events are important aspects of mental life, affecting emotions, decisions, and behaviors. However, studies examining their phenomenological characteristics and content have been few. Here we introduced a new method to systematically compare self-generated episodic counterfactuals to self-generated episodic memories and future projections with regard to their phenomenological characteristics (e.g., imagery, emotional valence, and rehearsal) and content (e.g., reference to a cultural life script), and how these were affected by temporal distance (1 month, 1 year, 5+ years). The findings showed that the three types of events differed phenomenologically. First, episodic memories were remembered more easily, with more sensory details, and from a dominantly field perspective, as compared to both future projections and episodic counterfactuals. Second, episodic future projections were more positive, more voluntarily rehearsed, and more central to life story and identity than were both episodic memories and episodic counterfactuals. Third, episodic counterfactuals differed from both episodic memories and future projections by neither having the positivity bias of the future events nor the enhanced sensory details of the past events. Across all three event types, sensory details decreased, whereas importance, reference to a cultural life script, and centrality increased with increasing temporal distance. The findings show that imagined events are phenomenologically different from memories of experienced events, consistent with reality-monitoring theory, and that imagined future events are different from both actual and imagined past events, consistent with some theories of motivation.