Using imagination to understand the neural basis of episodic memory

By Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran, Eleanor A. Maguire. Journal of Neuroscience, 2007

755 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Functional MRI (fMRI) studies investigating the neural basis of episodic memory recall, and the related task of thinking about plausible personal future events, have revealed a consistent network of associated brain regions. Surprisingly little, however, is understood about the contributions individual brain areas make to the overall recollective experience. To examine this, we used a novel fMRI paradigm in which subjects had to imagine fictitious experiences. In contrast to future thinking, this results in experiences that are not explicitly temporal in nature or as reliant on self-processing. By using previously imagined fictitious experiences as a comparison for episodic memories, we identified the neural basis of a key process engaged in common, namely scene construction, involving the generation, maintenance and visualization of complex spatial contexts. This was associated with activations in a distributed network, including hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and retrosplenial cortex. Importantly, we disambiguated these common effects from episodic memory-specific responses in anterior medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus. These latter regions may support self-schema and familiarity processes, and contribute to the brain's ability to distinguish real from imaginary memories. We conclude that scene construction constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory and imagination of fictitious experiences, and suggest it may partially account for the similar brain networks implicated in navigation, episodic future thinking, and the default mode. We suggest that additional brain regions are co-opted into this core network in a task-specific manner to support functions such as episodic memory that may have additional requirements.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a943bb51790e7f5606cd6d4f8b829ed567265c3e

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Citations in the corpus

Emotion and the Prefrontal Cortex: An Integrative Review (2017, background): “The network to which it belongs has been linked to scene construction (AndrewsHanna, Reidler, Huang, et al., 2010; Hassabis et al., 2007) and the spontaneous generation of thoughts (Christoff et al.”
The Neuropsychological Connection Between Creativity and Meditation (2009, background): “Theta activity appears in the hippocampal formation (Greenstein, Pavlides, & Winson, 1988 , cited in Klimesche, 1996 ; Larson, Wong, & Lynch, 1986 ), an area important in novelty detection (Knight, 1996 ), and in imagining fictitious scenes (Hassabis, Kumaran, & Maguire, 2007 ).”
Functional-Anatomic Fractionation of the Brain's Default Network (2010, positive): “Consistent with this finding, patients with hippocampal amnesia lack the ability to imagine a coherent scene presumably void of a temporal context (Hassabis et al., 2007b; see also Hassabis et al., 2007a; Addis et al., 2009).”
Evaluative and generative modes of thought during the creative process (2012, background): “Consistent with this, imagining novel, fictitious scenes activates the sameMTL regions as future event simulation (Hassabis et al., 2007).”
Inductive biases for deep learning of higher-level cognition (2020, background): “Neuroscientists have also accumulated evidence that the hippocampus is involved in replaying sequences (from memory or imagination) for consolidation into cortex [212,213] so that they can be presumably committed to cortical long-term memory and fast inference.”
Patterns of Brain Activity Supporting Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, and Theory of Mind, and Their Relationship to the Default Mode Network (2010, background): “Notably, there was also substantial involvement of the hippocampal formation for autobiographical memory and prospection: This may be due to the temporal extension of the self and greater recombination of contextualized event details involved in remembering and prospection (Hassabis, Kumaran, & Magu”
The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain (2012, methodology): “For example, in a study that used the Autobiographical Interview as well as measures of scene construction based on prior work by Hassabis et al. (2007b), Squire et al. (2010) reported that amnesic patients with damage to the hippocampus showed an intact ability to create detailed imaginary future…”
The hippocampus and memory: insights from spatial processing (2008, background): “A functional-imaging study of this task in healthy adults showed that the hippocampus was activated during the period of imaginatio”