The Characteristics of Directive Future Experiences and Directive Memories

People can mentally travel to the future to "prelive" events they might experience. This ability to mentally prelive future events is closely related to the ability to mentally relive past events. People report traveling back in time to relive experiences that happened in their past in order to direct their behavior in the present, so people may imagine future experiences for similar reasons. If people use imagined future experiences to direct their behavior, how do the characteristics of these directive future experiences compare with those of directive memories? To address that question, we asked subjects to describe either an imagined future event or a remembered event that had helped them when they thought of it. We then asked each subject to rate phenomenological and memorial characteristics of his or her event, including how vivid and emotionally evocative it was, how often he or she rehearsed it, and its emotional valence. We also classified each event according to its relationship with the cultural life script (CLS). Across two experiments, we found that directive future experiences were more evocative, more frequently rehearsed, more positive, and more often drawn from the CLS than directive memories. These results suggest that, although imagined future experiences may, like memories of past experiences, serve a directive function, the characteristics of these two classes of experience are distinct. We also found that many directive memories were negative, suggesting a special role for these memories in guiding behavior. The consequences of mental time travel on behavior warrant further study.