Creative Mental Time Travelling: The Influence of Divergent Thinking on the Construction of Autobiographical Past and Future

Memory recall is characterized by a reconstructive process characterized by flexible recombination of episodic and semantic materials and provides the basis for mental time travel in the past and in the future. The present research aimed to investigate whether divergent thinking (DT) can have an influence on this process. Eighty-five participants (60 females, Mage = 36.05, SDage = 13.46) were involved in a randomized protocol of one DT and four narrative tasks. Results showed that DT is a positive significant predictor of several narrative measures: number of words, internal details, total coherence, episodic richness and meaning making of the narratives. No effect of DT emerged on the phenomenological measures. This study highlights that creative abilities can impact mental time travel processes by influencing narrative—but not phenomenological—aspects of the autobiographical recall and simulation of past and future events. Limitations and practical implications of our findings have been discussed.