Abstract: Mental time travel refers to the faculty that allows humans to mentally project themselves backwards in time to re-live, or forwards to pre-live events. There is growing interest in mental time travel in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, comparative psychology, and developmental psychology. Current developmental studies on mental time travel suggested that the key developments of mental time travel occur between the ages of 3 to 5. In the end, the possible trends for the future developmental research were pointed out from the aspects of the paradigms, the techniques, the mechanism, the cultural differences and so on.

Key words: mental time travel, episodic memory, episodic future thinking