 Past-oriented accounts appeal to functional incompatibilities between episodic memory and procedural (Sherry &amp; Schacter 1987) or semantic (Klein, Cosmides, Tooby, &amp; Chance 2002) memory. The thought behind such accounts is that it is adaptively beneficial to have access to information about particular past events, as opposed to the recurrent features of events that are reflected in semantic or procedural memory; such information might, for example, enable us to reevaluate general impressions of others formed on the basis of their past behaviour (Klein et al. 2009). Past-oriented accounts are plausible as far as the function of what-where-when memory is concerned, but they do not identify a function that could be performed only when what-where-when information is accompanied by autonoetic consciousness. Future-oriented and counterfactual accounts appeal to the link between episodic memory and episodic future thought (Suddendorf &amp; Corballis 2007; Tulving 2005) or episodic counterfactual thought (De Brigard 2014a). The thought behind such accounts is that it is adaptively beneficial to prepare for future events by directly anticipating them (in episodic future thought) or by considering alternative outcomes to past events (in episodic counterfactual thought); the ability to remember past events can then be explained as a byproduct of the ability to imagine future or counterfactual events. In line with these accounts, it has been suggested that future-oriented mental time travel may contribute to reducing delay discounting (Boyer 2008). It has also been suggested that the early human cognitive niche may have involved selection for a capacity for anticipatory planning (Osvath &amp; Gärdenfors 2005), a suggestion that resonates with views that link mental time travel to other cognitive capacities, such as language, that appear to be unique to humans (Corballis 2011; Ferretti &amp; Cosentino 2013; Suddendorf 2013).