An fMRI investigation of the relationship between future imagination and cognitive flexibility

In recent years, neuroimaging has provided evidence to suggest that imagining the future relies on much of the same neural machinery as remembering the past. One hypothesis that such findings motivate is that memories must be reactivated in order to extract the information needed to “flesh out” detailed simulations. Indeed, if simulations involve t... See more

A related line of enquiry is to determine not only whether the hippocampus is active during future simulation but whether it makes a critical and necessary contribution. While it has been long established that a functioning hippocampus is necessary for the retrieval of detailed autobiographical memories (for a review, see Moscovitch et al., 2005), ... See more

a particularly vivid form of future thinking: the imaginative construction or simulation of scenarios that might occur in one’s future. We hypothesized that the flexible use of episodic details from memory during imaginative simulations of the future can help to understand constructive aspects of memory, such as its susceptibility to distortion (se... See more

Thus, it remains an open question as to whether the hippocampus is necessary for future simulation.

One of the leading researchers in this area is Donna Rose Addis, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. Her work has redefined the function of episodic memory as being ‘primarily future-focused’, and she recently discovered that some parts of the hippoc

... See more

One of the leading researchers in this area is Donna Rose Addis, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. Her work has redefined the function of episodic memory as being ‘primarily future-focused’, and she recently discovered that some parts of the hippoc

... See more

One of the leading researchers in this area is Donna Rose Addis, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. Her work has redefined the function of episodic memory as being ‘primarily future-focused’, and she recently discovered that some parts of the hippoc

... See more

The precuneus is involved in mental imagery concerning the self, episodic memory, and modeling other people’s views—all of which are main components of the DMN. Benedek and Jauk, psychologists specializing in research on creativity, note that “higher creativity is consistently associated with higher gray matter density in DMN regions, especially th... See more