Coherence and congruency mediate medial temporal and medial prefrontal activity during event construction

The precise roles of the hippocampus (HPC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in initially constructing imagined events remains unclear. HPC activity during imagination may be modulated by mnemonic load, given its role in working memory for complex materials, and/or by the semantic relatedness (i.e. congruency) between items and their context. MPFC activation may track with congruency or mnemonic load, given the role of ventral mPFC in schema processing and the dorsal mPFC in working memory for social information. Sixteen healthy adults (M age = 22.3) underwent an event construction task, wherein participants were provided with a context and item words and imagined an event, forming as many inter-item associations as possible among the items. The stimuli varied by set size and by normatively-defined congruence (normative congruency) to explore their effects on HPC and mPFC activity and functional connectivity. We observed HPC connectivity during event construction in general, whereas dorsal mPFC connectivity occurred during imagining only at higher set sizes. Moreover, anterior hippocampal activity correlated positively with increasing coherence between items during imagining, suggesting that the anterior HPC is sensitive to the relational demands of constructing a novel event. Parahippocampal, hippocampal, temporal pole, and mPFC activity tracked only with individual differences in subjective ratings of congruency of imagined events, which may contribute to construction by retrieving existing schema-related information. Collectively, these findings provide new insights into the factors that modulate HPC and mPFC activity when constructing mental simulations.