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What comes first? Electrophysiological differences in the temporal course of memory and future thinking
Author(s) -
Weiler Julia A.,
Suchan Boris,
Daum Irene
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1460-9568.2011.07630.x
Subject(s) - psychology , cognitive psychology , set (abstract data type) , associative property , elaboration , semantic memory , autobiographical memory , episodic memory , sensory memory , neuroscience , cognitive science , consciousness , brain activity and meditation , electrophysiology , cognition , working memory , electroencephalography , computer science , philosophy , mathematics , humanities , pure mathematics , programming language
It is now widely accepted that remembering the past and imagining the future rely on a number of shared processes and recruit a similar set of brain regions. However, memory and future thinking place different demands on a range of processes. For instance, although remembering should lead to early associative retrieval of event details, event construction may be slower for future events, for which details from different memories are combined. In order to shed light on the question of how the brain distinguishes between memories and future thoughts, we investigated the differences in the electrophysiological correlates of the vivid elaboration of future and past events. In the slow cortical potentials of 24 healthy human participants, differences during early elaboration were observed at temporo‐parietal and parieto‐occipital electrode sites, presumably reflecting differential recruitment of sensory and semantic detail retrieval. Additional differences emerged over the right pre‐frontal cortex during later elaboration, which could be linked to differential retrieval demands. In conclusion, the time course differences, which presumably reflect the varying recruitment of sub‐processes engaged during mental time travel, will help to understand the mechanisms with which the brain separates memories from future thoughts.