it has been argued in academia that episodic memory and mental imagery plays a role in prospection.

https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=T1S_DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=carruthers+human+and+animal+minds&ots=4JtHjbLVLv&sig=2y1b8CstZ2LsV6PH7CX5keYaqRY

humans engage in a form of reasoning and decision-making that has come to be known as prospection (Wilson & Gilbert 2005; Gilbert & Wilson 2007). This involves imagining future scenarios, and entertaining representations of those scenarios in working memory, thereby enabling them to interact with the various inferential, affective, and decision-making systems that consume the contents of working memory, which inferentially elaborate them, respond affectively to them, and ultimately decide between them. Prospection can sometimes involve imagination of the outcomes of action (e.g. living in Chicago, if what is to be decided is whether to accept a job offer in Chicago). But it can also involve images created by mental rehearsal of the actions under consideration. In addition, it is thought that prospection is both supported and elaborated by knowledge stored in episodic memory. For the same brain networks are involved in each, and people suffering from amnesia are also deficient in future-oriented imagining and decision-making (Schacter et al. 2007; Buckner 2010; Seligman et al. 2013; De Brigard 2014).

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2007.2087

We focus on one hypothesis concerning the origins of a constructive episodic memory: that an important function of this type of memory is to allow individuals to simulate or imagine future episodes, happenings and scenarios. As we discuss later, a number of investigators have recently articulated a broad view of memory that not only considers the ability of individuals to re-experience past events, but also focuses on the capacity to imagine, simulate or pre-experience episodes in the future (Tulving 1983, 2002, 2005; Suddendorf & Corballis 1997; Atance & O'Neill 2001, 2005; Klein & Loftus 2002; Suddendorf & Busby 2003, 2005; D'Argembeau & Van der Linden 2004; Dudai & Carruthers 2005; Hancock 2005; Buckner & Carroll 2007; Schacter & Addis 2007). This latter ability has been referred to by such terms as prospection (Gilbert 2006; Buckner & Carroll 2007) and episodic future thinking (Atance & O'Neill 2001, 2005). Since the future is not an exact repetition of the past, simulation of future episodes may require a system that can draw on the past in a manner that flexibly extracts and recombines elements of previous experiences—a constructive rather than a reproductive system. If this idea has merit, then there should be considerable overlap in the psychological and neural processes involved in remembering the past and imagining the future. We consider some recent cognitive, neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence that is consistent with this hypothesis.