[Remembering past events activates temporal concepts of future].

The cognitive function to project oneself into the specific past or future is labeled mental time travel (MTT). MTT to the past is considered "episodic memory" and the future is termed "episodic future thinking". Remembering the past and imaging the future during MTT both draw on information stored in episodic memory: a process that enables integration of episodic information into a coherent event representation. Recent studies suggested that episodic information in past/future event representations varies with temporal distance from the present to the event. However, it is unclear whether the influence on temporal distance is actually caused by the function of episodic memory retrieval. The present study investigated the relationship between episodic memory and temporal concepts with a lexical decision task. The results indicate that remembering the past activated temporal concepts of the near future more than that of the far future. This finding suggests that the rich information derived from episodic memory modulates the subjective sense of time in episodic future thinking.