During the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in research examining the role of memory in imagination and future thinking. This work has revealed striking similarities between remembering the past and imagining or simulating the future, including the finding that a common brain network underlies both memory and imagination. Here we discuss a number of key points that have emerged during recent years, focusing in particular on the importance of distinguishing between temporal and non-temporal factors in analyses of memory and imagination, the nature of differences between remembering the past and imagining the future, the identification of component processes that comprise the default network supporting memory-based simulations, and the finding that this network can couple flexibly with other networks to support complex goal-directed simulations. This growing area of research has broadened our conception of memory by highlighting the many ways in which memory supports adaptive functioning.

The ability to envision specific future episodes is a ubiquitous mental phenomenon that has seldom been discussed in the neuroscience literature. In this study, subjects underwent functional MRI while using event cues (e.g., Birthday) as a guide to vividly envision a personal future event, remember a personal memory, or imagine an event involving a familiar individual. Two basic patterns of data emerged. One set of regions (e.g., within left lateral premotor cortex; left precuneus; right posterior cerebellum) was more active while envisioning the future than while recollecting the past (and more active in both of these conditions than in the task involving imagining another person). These regions appear similar to those emerging from the literature on imagined (simulated) bodily movements. A second set of regions (e.g., bilateral posterior cingulate; bilateral parahippocampal gyrus; left occipital cortex) demonstrated indistinguishable activity during the future and past tasks (but greater activity in both tasks than the imagery control task); similar regions have been shown to be important for remembering previously encountered visual-spatial contexts. Hence, differences between the future and past tasks are attributed to differences in the demands placed on regions that underlie motor imagery of bodily movements, and similarities in activity for these two tasks are attributed to the reactivation of previously experienced visual-spatial contexts. That is, subjects appear to place their future scenarios in well known visual-spatial contexts. Our results offer insight into the fundamental and little-studied capacity of vivid mental projection of oneself in the future.autonoetic consciousness ͉ episodic future thought ͉ episodic memory ͉ functional MRI

The recent emergence and popularity of online educational resources brings with it challenges for educators to optimize the dissemination of online content. Here we provide evidence that points toward a solution for the difficulty that students frequently report in sustaining attention to online lectures over extended periods. In two experiments, we demonstrate that the simple act of interpolating online lectures with memory tests can help students sustain attention to lecture content in a manner that discourages taskirrelevant mind wandering activities, encourages task-relevant note-taking activities, and improves learning. Importantly, frequent testing was associated with reduced anxiety toward a final cumulative test and also with reductions in subjective estimates of cognitive demand. Our findings suggest a potentially key role for interpolated testing in the development and dissemination of online educational content.testing effects | massive open online courses O nline education is quickly becoming a central fixture in the college curriculum. The availability of free online courses with massive enrollments including students from all over the world (e.g., www.edX.org, www.coursera.org, http://2u.com, www. Udacity.com) has developed rapidly and captured widespread public attention. Within brick and mortar colleges, instructors are increasingly making use of flipped classrooms (1), whereby students are encouraged to study lectures on their own time and engage in activities geared toward a more in-depth understanding of the subject matter in the classroom. As such, institutions of higher education have devoted considerable time and effort to making large-scale and highly accessible online repositories of classroom lectures available to both students and the general public. Indeed, recent surveys indicate that students are increasingly using online lectures as a primary learning tool (2). At the same time, little is known about the potential limitations to learning from online lectures and how those limitations can be overcome. For instance, college students frequently report lapses of attention during lectures (3-6), and the tendency to mind wander (7-9) while viewing videotaped lectures has been shown to result in impoverished learning of lecture content (10). Such observations raise the need for rigorous investigations of learning from online lectures. For example, what interventions might remedy the tendency for students to mind wander while viewing online lectures and also allow them to quickly and efficiently extract lecture content? Here we test, and find support for, the hypothesis that interpolating online lectures with memory tests can both reduce the occurrence of mind wandering during lectures and foster task-relevant activities, such as note taking (11), that facilitate learning of lecture content.Our approach is based on recent studies demonstrating that interpolating the study of lists of words (12), face-name pairs (13), and prose passages (14) with memory tests can substantially improve the ty...

Episodic future thinking refers to the capacity to imagine or simulate experiences that might occur in one’s personal future. Cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging research concerning episodic future thinking has accelerated during recent years. This article discusses research that has delineated cognitive and neural mechanisms that support episodic future thinking as well as the functions that episodic future thinking serves. Studies focused on mechanisms have identified a core brain network that underlies episodic future thinking and have begun to tease apart the relative contributions of particular regions in this network, and the specific cognitive processes that they support. Studies concerned with functions have identified several domains in which episodic future thinking produces performance benefits, including decision making, emotion regulation, prospective memory, and spatial navigation.

Recent interest in the benefits of retrieval practice on long-term retention--the testing effect--has spawned a considerable amount of research toward understanding the underlying nature of this ubiquitous memory phenomenon. Taking a test may benefit retention through both direct means (engaging appropriate retrieval processes) and indirect means (fostering directed study). Here the authors report 4 experiments demonstrating a novel benefit of testing. Extended study sessions cause a buildup of proactive interference, but interpolating tests during the study sequence insulates against this negative influence. These findings highlight a unique benefit of testing and have important implications for study strategies.