Investigating the role of future thinking in a case of highly superior autobiographical memory

Highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) is characterised by a profound ability to recall personal experiences from long-term memory with extremely high detail and accuracy. Since the first documented case of HSAM in 2006, studies have demonstrated the apparent automatic and effortless retrieval of autobiographical memories, despite their Average performance on laboratory and neuropsychological tests of episodic memory. It remains unclear, however, if their ability to imagine future-oriented scenarios is also superior, a process that is known to rely heavily on our capacity to remember the past. Here we investigate autobiographical memory and future thinking in a case of HSAM. We report RS who endorses re-experiencing a constant influx of memories from almost every day of her life since early adolescence. RS's performance on tasks of autobiographical memory, episodic future thinking, and future-oriented scene construction was contrasted with six age- and sex-matched healthy control participants. Recollections of past autobiographical events were episodically richer in RS, but only when personal relevance of the event was highly constrained (i.e., cued by a single word and within a time limit). In addition, while imagination of plausible future events was significantly richer in episodic detail, construction of future-oriented narrative scenes was unremarkable. Our study is the first to investigate future thinking in HSAM. These individuals may engage in superior imagination of future scenarios, but only when these scenarios can be easily tied to their own personal narrative.