The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain

Schacter, Daniel L.; Addis, Donna Rose; Hassabis, Demis; Martin, Victoria C.; Spreng, R. Nathan; Szpunar, Karl K.

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2012.11.001

Cited by 1,191 publications

(997 citation statements)

References 213 publications

(357 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

932

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Findings from cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging research have shown that episodic future thoughts are created based on informational components provided by episodic and semantic memory (i.e., specific past experiences and general knowledge about the world and the self), and multiple cognitive processes are engaged to retrieve, select, and assemble relevant pieces of information (for reviews, see D 'Argembeau, 2015;Irish & Piguet, 2013;Klein, 2013;Schacter et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

Lehner

D’Argembeau

2016

Consciousness and Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although autonoetic experience-a sense of mental time travel-has been considered as the hallmark of episodic future thinking, what determines this subjective feeling is not yet fully understood. Here, we investigated the role of autobiographical knowledge by manipulating the relevance of imagined events for personal goals. Participants were asked to imagine three types of events (goal-related future events, experimenter-provided future events, and atemporal events) and to assess various characteristics of their mental representations. The results showed that the three types of events were represented with similar levels of detail and vividness. Importantly, however, goal-related future events were associated with a stronger autonoetic experience. Furthermore, autonoetic experience was significantly predicted by the importance of imagined events for personal goals. These findings suggest that the subjective feeling of pre-experiencing one's personal future in part depends on the extent to which imagined events can be placed in an autobiographical context.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

Lehner

D’Argembeau

2016

Consciousness and Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…With regard to the neuroimaging studies in healthy subjects, a striking overlap between the functional underpinnings of remembering the past and imagining the future has been observed. The mental time travel brain network, showing an extended overlap with the default network, encompasses the medial frontal and temporal regions, posterior and retrosplenial cortex, lateral parietal and temporal regions (see Schacter et al 2012 for a review). Despite the fact that these investigations have demonstrated similarities in terms of AM and EFT neurocognitive mechanisms, some differences have also been documented.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Distinct and common cerebral activation changes during mental time travel in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients

Ernst

Noblet

Denkova

et al. 2015

Brain Imaging and Behavior

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Mental time travel (MTT) entails the ability to mentally travel into autobiographical memory (AM) and episodic future thinking (EFT). While AM and EFT share common phenomenological and cerebral functional properties, distinctive characteristics have been documented in healthy and clinical populations. No report, to our knowledge, has informed on the functional underpinnings of MTT impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, hence the aim of this work. We studied 22 relapsing-remitting MS patients and 22 matched controls. Participants underwent an AM/EFT assessment using the Autobiographical Interview (Levine et al. 2002), followed by a functional MRI session. The latter consisted in AM and EFT tasks, distinguishing the construction and elaboration phases of events. The results showed impaired performance for AM and EFT in patients, accompanied by increased cerebral activations mostly located in the frontal regions, which extended to the parietal, lateral temporal and posterior regions during AM/EFT tasks, relative to healthy controls. Enhanced brain activations in MS patients were particularly evident during the EFT task and involved the hippocampus, frontal, external temporal, and cingulate regions. The construction phase required greater fronto-parieto-temporal activations in MS patients relative to both healthy controls, and the elaboration phase. Taking together, our results suggested the occurrence of cerebral activation changes in the context of MTT in MS patients, expressed by distinct and common mechanisms for AM and EFT. This study may provide new insights in terms of cerebral activation changes in brain lesion and their application to clinical settings, considering AM/EFT's central role in everyday life.

show abstract

“…This network acquired the name ‘default mode network’83 because it was active in subjects in fMRI experiments when they were not engaged in attention‐demanding goal‐directed cognitive challenges. The network might be better named the actor–scene or scenario network, since it supports not only autobiographical recall but also thinking about the minds and personalities71 of others, as well as future scenes84 involving self and others 78, 79, 80, 85, 86, 87. Much of the cognitive neuroscientific research on this network has focused on autobiographical memory and imagination,88 on constructive episodic memory as the basis for future episodic simulation (‘the ability to flexibly recombine elements of past experience into simulations of novel future events’),78, 85, 86, 89 and on the social imagination engaged in fiction 90, 91, 92.…”

Section: Evolving In the Narrative Nichementioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction

Boyd

2017

WIRES Cognitive Science

112

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Why a species as successful as Homo sapiens should spend so much time in fiction, in telling one another stories that neither side believes, at first seems an evolutionary riddle. Because of the advantages of tracking and recombining true information, capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, and communication evolved in a range of animal species—yet even chimpanzees cannot communicate beyond the here and now. By Homo erectus, our forebears had reached an increasing dependence on one another, not least in sharing information in mimetic, prelinguistic ways. As Daniel Dor shows, the pressure to pool ever more information, even beyond currently shared experience, led to the invention of language. Language in turn swiftly unlocked efficient forms of narrative, allowing early humans to learn much more about their kind than they could experience at first hand, so that they could cooperate and compete better through understanding one another more fully. This changed the payoff of sociality for individuals and groups. But true narrative was still limited to what had already happened. Once the strong existing predisposition to play combined with existing capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, language, and narrative, we could begin to invent fiction, and to explore the full range of human possibilities in concentrated, engaging, memorable forms. First language, then narrative, then fiction, created niches that altered selection pressures, and made us ever more deeply dependent on knowing more about our kind and our risks and opportunities than we could discover through direct experience. WIREs Cogn Sci 2018, 9:e1444. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1444This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of CognitionLinguistics > Evolution of LanguageNeuroscience > Cognition

show abstract

The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain

Cited by 1,191 publications

References 213 publications

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

Distinct and common cerebral activation changes during mental time travel in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients

The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About