Episodic mindreading: Mentalizing guided by scene construction of imagined and remembered events

Attributing mental states to other people fundamentally shapes how we bond, coordinate, and predict the actions of others. Perceiving a person's facial expressions and body language in the present contribute to our ability to understand what they are thinking and feeling. Yet, people do not exist in a vacuum and individuals often think about people who are not directly in front of them. People inhabit remembered and imagined episodes, where the surrounding location and objects can guide attributions of their mental states. In this article, I propose the episodic mindreading hypothesis, arguing that the episodic representation of past and future events in which a target person is embedded will affect whether and how the target's mind is read. The content and phenomenological quality of imagined and remembered episodes can alter what mental states are attributed to a target and the accessibility of those mental states. This hypothesis encourages researchers to think about mentalizing as neither dependent on nor completely exclusive from the episodic memory system. Instead, the episodic memory system can modulate and inform mindreading, and likely vice versa. The article reviews extant knowledge and highlights open questions for future research to explore with implications for healthy and impaired social cognition.