Episodic simulation of past and future events in older adults: Evidence from an experimental recombination task.

Abstract

We recently reported that older adults generate fewer episodic details than younger adults when remembering past events and simulating future events. We suggested that the simulation findings reveal an age deficit in recombining episodic details into novel events, but they could also result from older adults 'recasting' entire past events as future events. In this study, we used an experimental recombination paradigm to prevent 'recasting' while imagining, and to compare imagining the future with imagining the past. Older adults generated fewer episodic details for imagined and recalled events than younger adults, thereby extending the age-related simulation deficit to conditions of recombination.Keywords episodic memory; aging; future simulation; imagining Recent cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging studies have revealed striking commonalities in the processes that support remembering the past and imagining the future (for reviews, see Buckner & Carroll, 2007;Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007;Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2008; Szpunar, in press). For example, cognitive studies indicate that manipulating factors such as valence and temporal distance from the present (e.g., D 'Argembeau & van der Linden, 2004) and contextual vividness (Szpunar & McDermott, 2008), and individuals differences in visual imagery abilities and emotion regulation strategies (D'Argembeau & van der Linden, 2006), exert similar effects on the phenomenology of past and future events. Neuropsychological evidence reveals that amnesic patients exhibit deficits in imagining future or novel events (Hassabis, Kumaran, Vann, & Maguire, 2007;Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 2002;Tulving, 1985), as do patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (Addis, Sacchetti, Ally, Budson, & Schacter, in press). Neuroimaging studies show that many of the same brain regions that are active when remembering the past are similarly active when imagining the future (Addis, Pan, Vu, Laiser, & Schacter, 2009;Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2007;Botzung, Dankova, & Manning, 2008;Okuda et al., 2003;Szpunar, Watson, & McDermott, 2007). These and , which holds that 1) past and future events draw on similar information and rely on similar underlying processes; 2) episodic memory supports the construction of future events by extracting and recombining stored information into a simulation of a novel event, and 3) a critical function of a constructive memory system is to make information available for simulation of future events, thereby enabling past information to be used flexibly in simulating alternative future scenarios, but also resulting in vulnerability to memory errors, such as source misattribution and false recognition. Other related theories, such as the scene construction hypothesis also emphasize the importance of retrieving relevant pieces of information from memory and integrating these 'information components' into a coherent scenarios. Indeed, Hassabis, Kumaran, Vann and Maguire (2007) demonstrated that hippocampal amnesic patients exhibit deficits in ima...

Inducing involuntary and voluntary mental time travel using a laboratory paradigm

“…Contributing to these findings are neuroimaging studies indicating more cognitive effort for future versus past events (see Schacter et al, 2012, for a review). It is possible that the cognitive effort associated with future thinking depends upon moderating factors, such as the degree of schema-based construction (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010), event novelty, or the extent of novel recombination (see Addis et al, 2010). In fact, the present findings suggest that strategically constructed future events may allow the construction of events with unfamiliar locations, whereas this is more unlikely under involuntary conditions.…”

“…In fact, the present findings suggest that strategically constructed future events may allow the construction of events with unfamiliar locations, whereas this is more unlikely under involuntary conditions. Also, a study of older adults suggests that it may be more demanding to imagine events drawn from disparate episodic details (Addis et al, 2010). This suggests future studies should measure factors potentially moderating cognitive effort.…”

“…To provide information on the extent that involuntary and voluntary future representations draw upon previous experience, we included two items concerning the novelty of future events: The extent to which the event or location had been experienced previously. These measures were included to verify that future events were not memories recast in a future orientation (for a related discussion, see Addis, Musicaro, Pan, & Schacter, 2010). Questions presented in Part 2 were identical for involuntary/voluntary conditions and were phrased according to their temporal orientation.…”

Role of the hippocampus in remembering the past and imagining the future

“…For each episode (past and future), a noun cue was provided to facilitate recall (e.g., "tree"), although the episode could be unrelated to the word. It was emphasized that the episode imagined for the future should not be similar to an actual past event (to discourage participants from remembering a past event and then recasting it for the future (38). Three minutes were allowed for recollecting or imagining each event.…”

Prevalence and determinants of direct and generative modes of production of episodic future thoughts in the word cueing paradigm

“…Furthermore, in the present experiment, participants were also asked to rate the similarity of the imagined event to previously experienced events (from 1 = the exact same event was experienced previously, to 5 = the event is completely novel; Addis, Musicaro, Pan, & Schacter, 2010) and to indicate whether they thought about one or more past event(s) during the imagination of the future event (by answering "yes" or "no"; if they responded "yes", they were also asked to indicate if they used this or these event(s) for imagining the future event, by answering "yes or "no").…”