The authors suggested that KC relies on his intact semantic memory when making decisions about the future. Clearly, developing a more complete understanding of the separate and possibly interacting influences of episodic and semantic memory processes for farsighted versus impulsive future decisions represents an important avenue for future research. These considerations also highlight the potentially

important contributions made by semantic memory to imagining the future. We began this review by noting that we would focus primarily on episodic memory, and though there is little doubt that episodic memory plays a key role in imagining the future, Autophagy animal study it is also clear that NSC 683864 semantic memory is highly relevant (Klein, 2012; Martin-Ordas et al., 2012). For example, early work by Klein et al. (2002) examined the role of semantic memory in thinking about the future, and this link has been acknowledged by a number of investigators (e.g., Abraham et al., 2008a; Binder and Desai, 2011; Duval et al.,

2012; Irish et al., 2012; Suddendorf and Corballis, 2007; Schacter et al., 2008; Szpunar, 2010). Several recent findings, in addition to the work by Kwan et al. (2012) on temporal discounting, highlight ways in which semantic memory can contribute to imagining future episodes, including findings that (1) patients with impaired semantic memory show a reduced ability to generate specific future episodes (Duval et al., 2012; Irish et al., 2012) and also show deficits in constructing semantic future scenarios (Duval et al., 2012), (2) some default network regions are active during both

episodic and semantic future thinking SPTLC1 tasks (Abraham et al., 2008a), and (3) general or semantic personal knowledge guides retrieval of episodic details during the construction of future events in healthy individuals, providing a basis for structuring and interpreting them (D’Argembeau and Mathy, 2011; D’Argembeau and Demblon, 2012). Taken together, we think that these findings suggest that semantic memory plays an important role in the process of recombination, which has been emphasized as critical for constructing simulated scenarios, and thus believe that an important task will be to distinguish episodic and semantic contributions to the process of recombination. While it has been suggested that future thinking based on semantic memory may draw heavily on lateral and anterior temporal lobe regions (e.g., Addis et al., 2007, 2011b; Irish et al., 2012), more direct investigations are needed. Studies of remembering the past and imagining the future should benefit from establishing closer connections with work on narrative processing and the representation of nonpersonal fictional information.