Mentally traveling to one's personal past and future connects the current self with self at different points in time. When making decisions in the present, individuals benefit from their past and potential future decisions with the help of mental time travel. This review documents the theoretical and empirical studies concerning mental time travel to past and future decisions and their influence on current decision-making processes. Particularly, certain characteristics of past and future decisions directly or indirectly influence present life decisions. Synthesizing the existing literature, we developed a theoretical model suggests that temporally close decisions tend to include different type of details and diverge from distant decisions in terms of personal meaningfulness. Further, past and future decisions that are elaborated and meaningful, have a great impact on present decisions. Future empirical work testing this model has the potential to generate findings that will inform intervention strategies towards improved decision-making.

心理旅行到一个人的过去和未来，将当前的自我与不同时间的自我联系起来。在当前进行决策时，个人会在精神时光旅行的帮助下从过去和潜在的未来决策中受益。这篇综述记录了有关精神上的时间旅行到过去和将来的决策及其对当前决策过程的影响的理论和实证研究。特别地，过去和将来的决策的某些特征直接或间接地影响当前的生活决策。综合现有文献，我们开发了一种理论模型，表明时间上接近的决策倾向于包含不同类型的细节，并且在个人意义上与遥远的决策有所不同。更多，详尽而有意义的过去和将来的决策对当前的决策有很大的影响。对该模型进行未来的实证研究可能会产生发现，这些发现将有助于干预策略改善决策。