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.

将精神状态归因于其他人从根本上决定了我们如何结合，协调和预测他人的行为。目前，感知一个人的面部表情和肢体语言有助于我们理解他们的想法和感觉。但是，人们并不存在于真空中，人们经常会想到不在他们面前的人。人们居住在记忆和想象的情节中，周围的位置和物体可以指导他们的心理状态归因。在本文中，我提出了情节性的心智假设，认为目标人物嵌入其中的过去和将来事件的情景表达将影响是否以及如何读取目标人物的思想。想象和记住的情节的内容和现象学质量可以改变归因于目标的心理状态以及这些心理状态的可及性。该假设鼓励研究人员考虑将心理思维视为既不依赖也不完全脱离情节性记忆系统。取而代之的是，情节记忆系统可以调节和告知心智阅读，反之亦然。这篇文章回顾了现有知识，并突出了开放性问题，以供将来研究，以探索对健康和受损的社会认知的影响。