Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 108, Issue 33, Pages 13858-13863Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1105816108
Keywords
episodic memory; autobiographical memory; future thinking; prospection
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden [UOA0810]
- National Institute of Mental Health [MH060941]
- New Zealand International Doctoral Scholarship
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The role of the hippocampus in imagining the future has been of considerable interest. Preferential right hippocampal engagement is observed for imagined future events relative to remembered past events, and patients with hippocampal damage are impaired when imagining detailed future events. However, some patients with hippocampal damage are not impaired at imagining, suggesting that there are conditions in which the hippocampus may not be necessary for episodic simulation. Given the known hippocampal role in memory encoding, the hippocampal activity associated with imagining may reflect the encoding of simulations rather than event construction per se. The present functional (f)MRI study investigated this possibility. Participants imagined future events in response to person, place, and object cues. A postscan cued-recall test probing memory for detail sets classified future events as either successfully encoded or not. A contrast of successfully versus unsuccessfully encoded events revealed anterior and posterior right hippocampal clusters. When imagined events were successfully encoded, both anterior and posterior hippocampus showed common functional connectivity to a network including parahippocampal gyrus, medial parietal and cingulate cortex, and medial prefrontal cortex. However, when encoding was unsuccessful, only the anterior hippocampus, and not the posterior, exhibited this pattern of connectivity. These findings demonstrate that right hippocampal activity observed during future simulation may reflect the encoding of the simulations into memory. This function is not essential for constructing coherent scenarios and may explain why some patients with hippocampal damage are still able to imagine the future.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available