In the present study, we sought to examine the effects of brain damage on both autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking in the same sample of individuals suffering www.selleckchem.com/products/abc294640.html from traumatic brain injury (TBI). Although growing evidence indicates that TBI can impair the ability to recall specific events from the personal past (Carlesimo et al., 1998; Knight & O’Hagan,

2009; Levin et al., 1985; Piolino et al., 2007) and may lead to deficits in conscious recollection of personal events (autonoetic consciousness) (Piolino et al., 2007), little is known about the corresponding ability to imagine possible future events in TBI patients. To our knowledge, no prior study has sought to investigate both episodic

memory and episodic future thinking in people suffering from TBI. However, the potential applied benefits of such an investigation may be considerable, in that episodic future thinking is thought to play a pivotal role in successful planning, behavioural flexibility, and self regulation (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). If individuals suffering from TBI experience difficulties not only in recalling past events but also in simulating future plans of actions, and have problems considering alternative courses of action through future simulations, they might LGK-974 rely on stereotypical and rigid routines to guide behaviour. Thus, episodic future thinking deficit may contribute

to the behavioural inflexibility and poor goal attainment often associated with TBI. The main aim of the present study was to examine whether individuals suffering from severe TBI have an impaired ability for autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking. As no previous study has systematically examined both autobiographical remembering and future thinking in a TBI sample, the present work addresses a critical gap in the literature on mental time travel. Provided that autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking rely on common neurocognitive processes, individuals with TBI should experience difficulties in both recalling and imagining specific events. First, it was predicted that relative to healthy controls, participants with TBI would show impairments selleck chemical in both episodic remembering and episodic future thinking (i.e., would recall and imagine significantly fewer episodic, event-specific details). Second, we expected an effect of future versus past temporal direction, in that future events would contain fewer episodic details than past events, consistent with previous work (Addis et al., 2009). However, as episodic future thinking seems to require more constructive effort, as indicated by reports of higher levels of activation in thinking about the future than the past in functional neuroimaging studies (Addis, Wong et al., 2007; Okuda et al., 2003; Szpunar et al.