MEMORY AND TEMPORAL EXPERIENCE: THE EFFECTS OF EPISODIC MEMORY LOSS ON AN AMNESIC PATIENT’S ABILITY TO REMEMBER THE PAST AND IMAGINE THE FUTURE Stanley B. Klein and Judith Loftus University of California, Santa Barbara John F. Kihlstrom University of California, Berkeley This article examines the effects of memory loss on a patient’s ability to remember the past and imagine the future. We present the case of D.B., who, as a result of hypoxic brain damage, suffered severe amnesia for the personally experienced past. By contrast, his knowledge of the nonpersonal past was relatively preserved. A similar pattern was evidenced in his ability to anticipate future events. Although D.B. had great difficulty imagining what his experiencesmight be like in the future, his capacity to anticipate issues and events in the public domain was comparable to that of neurologically healthy, age-matchedcontrols. These findings suggest that neuropsychological dissociations between episodic and semantic memory for the past also may extend to the ability to anticipate the future. Our experience of personal identity depends, in a fundamental way, on our capacity to represent the self as a psychologically coherent entity persisting through time, whose past experiences are remembered as be- longing to its present self (e.g., Klein, 2001). The experience of self-conti- nuity, in turn, provides the mental scaffolding from which we can imagine possible futures states in which we might be involved (for re- view, see Moore & Lemmon, 2001). Perhaps the best way to convey the Social Cognition, Vol. 20, No. 5, 2002, pp. 353-379 353 This work was supported by an Academic Senate Research Grant to Stanley B. Klein from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH-35956 to John F. Kihlstrom. We would like to thank Mark Wheeler and Gianfranco Dalla Barba for their extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this ar- ticle. Address correspondence to Stanley B. Klein, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106; E-mail: klein@psych.ucsb.edu.