Constructive episodic simulation of the future and the past: Distinct subsystems of a core brain network mediate imagining and remembering
Section snippets
Participants
Healthy, right-handed young adults with no prior history of neurological or psychiatric impairment were recruited for participation in this study. For any undergraduate students recruited, only those in their second or third year of their 4-year program were permitted to enroll, ensuring that both the last and next 5 years (the temporal interval within which events would be imagined) included both college and non-college years. For the same reason, any college graduates recruited were required
Behavioral results
Only successfully completed trials were included in the analyses. For autobiographical events, this included trials on which participants: (1) successfully imagined or retrieved a specific event as instructed and (2) described the event during the post-scan interview, resulting in the loss of an average of 3.19% (sd = 6.41%) and 1.94% (sd = 4.42%) of trials, respectively. Additionally, trials for which the reaction time was missing or excessively fast (i.e., before the trial onset of 2 s used in the
Common activation of the core network during imagining and remembering
The present study was designed to address a number of issues arising from recent neuroimaging studies on remembering the past and imagining the future. One issue concerns the underlying basis for the common activation of the core network during past and future event tasks. In our constructive episodic simulation hypothesis (Schacter and Addis, 2007a, Schacter and Addis, 2007b), we proposed that such common activation reflects the reliance of both past and future events on episodic memory: when
Acknowledgements
We thank Joe Paxton and Jill Clark for assistance with data collection and Regina Musicaro for assistance with data analysis, and Randy McIntosh for contributing his PLS expertise. We also thank reviewers for their helpful comments. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant MH060941, awarded to D.L.S. We are especially thankful to Endel Tulving for inspiring our interest in the issues addressed in this article, beginning with his testing of future thinking
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