中文摘要：

情节式未来思考是将自我投射到未来以预先经历某事件的能力。本文综述情节式未来思考的年龄差异及其脑机制,重点阐述情节式未来思考的个体发生发展及其现象学特征的年龄差异,情节式未来思考年龄差异的脑机制主要涉及颞叶及楔前叶、海马以及额叶等脑区。未来研究应扩大正常人与特殊群体的年龄范围,关注情节式未来思考年龄差异的研究角度及纵向交叉研究,同时需结合内外部影响因素进行研究,这在认知老化中有重要的社会应用价值。

英文摘要：

Episodic future thinking（EFT） is a projection of the self into the future to pre-experience an event. It plays a significant role in our daily life, especially in the process of planning, problem solving and delay of gratification. The present study explored the age difference and its underlying neural mechanism in EFT.The age difference of EFT focused on the occurrence and development of individual and phenomenological characteristics in age-related changes. Specifically, the occurrence of individual EFT was about four years old when children happened to imagine future and showed appropriate behavior according to possible future situations. The ability of individuals’ EFT improved as they grew older. For example, compared with children, adolescents created more episodic and semantic details when imagining future events. The age difference of phenomenal characteristics associated with projecting oneself forward into the future mainly includes the kind of details, the valence and intensity of emotion, temporal distance, novelty and vividness of events. Specifically, as to the details, young adults produced more details, whereas children and the old presented more general but not special ones; for emotional valence, old adults showed more positive effect. However, further research is needed to explore whether the effect exists in EFT; for emotional intensity, the old scored higher than the youth; for the temporal distance, former researches showed that children and adults generated more specific simulation of the near-future events; For the novelty and vividness of events, the age difference of EFT existed in the number of vivid images so that the young produced more vivid images compared to the old. To conclude, there were some age differences in phenomenological characteristics of EFT. Generally speaking, the development of EFT showed an inverted U function peaking at adulthood.The underlying neural mechanism in EFT referred to the brain-related activation of the age difference, which mainly included brain