Contributions of episodic retrieval and mentalizing to autobiographical thought: evidence from functional neuroimaging, resting-state connectivity, and fMRI meta-analyses

By Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, Rebecca Saxe, Tal Yarkoni. NeuroImage, 2014

296 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing number of studies suggest the brain’s “default network” becomes engaged when individuals recall their personal past or simulate their future. Recent reports of heterogeneity within the network raises the possibility that these autobiographical processes are comprised of multiple component processes, each supported by distinct functional-anatomic subsystems. We previously hypothesized that a medial temporal subsystem contributes to autobiographical memory and future thought by enabling individuals to retrieve prior information and bind this information into a mental scene. Conversely, a dorsal medial subsystem was proposed to support social-reflective aspects of autobiographical thought, allowing individuals to reflect on the mental states of one’s self and others (i.e. “mentalizing”). To test these hypotheses, we first examined activity in the default network subsystems as participants performed two commonly employed tasks of episodic retrieval and mentalizing. In a subset of participants, relationships among task-evoked regions were examined at rest, in the absence of an overt task. Finally, large-scale fMRI meta-analyses were conducted to identify brain regions that most strongly predicted the presence of episodic retrieval and mentalizing, and these results were compared to meta-analyses of autobiographical tasks. Across studies, laboratory-based episodic retrieval tasks were preferentially linked to the medial temporal subsystem, while mentalizing tasks were preferentially linked to the dorsal medial subsystem. In turn, autobiographical tasks engaged aspects of both subsystems. These results suggest the default network is a heterogeneous brain system whose subsystems support distinct component processes of autobiographical thought.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a34c2d7e79fea2076ad7ac7e952136e2058dbe3

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Citations in the corpus

Capturing the spatiotemporal dynamics of self-generated, task-initiated thoughts with EEG and fMRI (2019, unknown): “In line with previous task-related studies (Andrews-Hanna, 2012; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014; Axelrod et al., 2017), the fMRI data revealed that thinking about self-experienced past events boosted a brain network known to be related to autobiographic episodic memory, while performing mental arithmeti”
The Default Network and Social Cognition (2015, methodology): “The functions of the three components of the default network, derived from a whole-brain RSFC study (Figure 1(a); Yeo et al., 2011), were decoded using the NeuroSynth framework (originally reported by Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014).”
Heterogeneity within the frontoparietal control network and its relationship to the default and dorsal attention networks (2017, background): “Specifically, the DN is involved in mentalizing (36), autobiographical memory (37), spontaneous cognition (38–41), self-referential processing (42), and high-level aspects of emotion (34, 43, 44).”
20 years of the default mode network: a review and synthesis (2023, background): “52,53 The DMN has emerged as a central construct for investigating episodic memory and speciﬁcally the subjective experience of remembering.”
The wandering brain: Meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of mind-wandering and related spontaneous thought processes (2015, unknown): “The reference lists of each included study, as well as those of several major reviews (Andrews-Hanna, 2012; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014b; Christoff, 2012), were also searched, to ensure completeness.”