Are episodic memories special? On the sameness of remembered and imagined event simulation

Over the past decade, episodic memory has been reconceptualised as future-oriented. In 2007, Schacter and I proposed the ‘constructive episodic simulation hypothesis’ to account for emerging findings that past and future thinking share overlapping cognitive and neural substrates, arguing that the constructive nature of episodic memory provides the perfect neurocognitive architecture for future simulation. Here, I update and refine this theoretical position, arguing that, fundamentally, episodic memories are not special. I shift the emphasis from conceptualising memory as the basis of imagination, instead proposing that both are instantiations of the same constructive simulation process. I synthesise emerging neuroscientific perspectives to show how the brain’s default mode network underpins the remembering, imagining and perception of event representations via a common simulation process that is constructive and iterative, involving the interaction of pre-existing knowledge and reinstated perceptual content with incoming experiential information to create and refine online mental simulations of experience.Donna Rose Addis.