Escaping the Past: Contributions of the Hippocampus to Future Thinking and Imagination

The hippocampus has long been of interest to memory researchers, but recent studies have also implicated the hippocampus in various aspects of future thinking and imagination. Here we provide an overview of relevant studies and ideas that have attempted to characterize the contributions of the hippocampus to future thinking and imagination, focusing mainly on neuroimaging studies conducted in our laboratories that have been concerned with episodic simulation or the construction of a detailed mental representation of a possible experience. We briefly describe a multi-component model of hippocampal contributions to episodic simulation, and also consider the hippocampal contributions in the context of a recent taxonomy that distinguishes several forms of future thinking.