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We recently reported that older adults generate fewer episodic details than younger adults when remembering past events and simulating future events. We suggested that the simulation findings reveal an age deficit in recombining episodic details into novel events, but they could also result from older adults 'recasting' entire past events as future events. In this study, we used an experimental recombination paradigm to prevent 'recasting' while imagining, and to compare imagining the future with imagining the past. Older adults generated fewer episodic details for imagined and recalled events than younger adults, thereby extending the age-related simulation deficit to conditions of recombination.Keywords episodic memory; aging; future simulation; imagining Recent cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging studies have revealed striking commonalities in the processes that support remembering the past and imagining the future (for reviews, see Buckner & Carroll, 2007;Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007;Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2008; Szpunar, in press). For example, cognitive studies indicate that manipulating factors such as valence and temporal distance from the present (e.g., D 'Argembeau & van der Linden, 2004) and contextual vividness (Szpunar & McDermott, 2008), and individuals differences in visual imagery abilities and emotion regulation strategies (D'Argembeau & van der Linden, 2006), exert similar effects on the phenomenology of past and future events. Neuropsychological evidence reveals that amnesic patients exhibit deficits in imagining future or novel events (Hassabis, Kumaran, Vann, & Maguire, 2007;Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 2002;Tulving, 1985), as do patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (Addis, Sacchetti, Ally, Budson, & Schacter, in press). Neuroimaging studies show that many of the same brain regions that are active when remembering the past are similarly active when imagining the future (Addis, Pan, Vu, Laiser, & Schacter, 2009;Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2007;Botzung, Dankova, & Manning, 2008;Okuda et al., 2003;Szpunar, Watson, & McDermott, 2007). These and , which holds that 1) past and future events draw on similar information and rely on similar underlying processes; 2) episodic memory supports the construction of future events by extracting and recombining stored information into a simulation of a novel event, and 3) a critical function of a constructive memory system is to make information available for simulation of future events, thereby enabling past information to be used flexibly in simulating alternative future scenarios, but also resulting in vulnerability to memory errors, such as source misattribution and false recognition. Other related theories, such as the scene construction hypothesis also emphasize the importance of retrieving relevant pieces of information from memory and integrating these 'information components' into a coherent scenarios. Indeed, Hassabis, Kumaran, Vann and Maguire (2007) demonstrated that hippocampal amnesic patients exhibit deficits in ima...

Divergent thinking likely plays an important role in simulating autobiographical events. We investigated whether divergent thinking is differentially associated with the ability to construct detailed imagined future and imagined past events as opposed to recalling past events. We also examined whether age differences in divergent thinking might underlie the reduced episodic detail generated by older adults. The richness of episodic detail comprising autobiographical events in young and older adults was assessed using the Autobiographical Interview. Divergent thinking abilities were measured using the Alternate Uses Task. Divergent thinking was significantly associated with the amount of episodic detail for imagined future events. Moreover, while age was significantly associated with imagined episodic detail, this effect was strongly related to age-related changes in episodic retrieval rather than divergent thinking.

Recent studies have confirmed that people produce mental simulation when processing sentences including literal motion, abstract motion or fictive motion. However, the doubt is whether EFL learners mentally simulate fictive motion during language comprehension as native English speaker did. The paper addressed the question with simulation time effects, one of the experimental methods in simulation semantics in one experiment made of 4 tasks. In each task, subjects read a short story-slow versus fast scenario, easy versus difficult scenario and short versus long distance scenario, then made a timed decision whether the target fictive motion sentence related to the story or not. The results are that the response latency in different scenarios is significant. Thereby we conclude that EFL learners activates mental simulation in the same way as native English speaker when processing sentences involved the fictive motion.