Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration
Section snippets
Participants
Sixteen healthy, right-handed adults (seven male; mean age, 23 years; range, 18–33 years) with no prior history of neurological or psychiatric impairment participated in the study. Two participants were excluded due to an insufficient number of responses during the scan and post-scan interview. All participants gave informed written consent in a manner approved by the Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Institutional Review Boards.
Stimuli
Ninety-six nouns were selected from the Clark and Pavio
Behavioral results
Participants were successfully able to construct an event during scanning and describe the event in the post-scan interview for an average of 21.64 past (SD = 2.17) and 22.29 future (SD = 1.90) event tasks (out of a maximum of 24 of each event type). These events were then rated objectively for episodic specificity and only events with a score of 3 (i.e., specific in time and place) were included in subsequent analyses (examples of specific past and future events are provided in Appendix A).
Discussion
Our data support the hypothesis that both common and distinct neural substrates mediate past and future events, consistent with the findings of the one previous neuroimaging study that examined this question (Okuda et al., 2003). In the present study, however, we teased apart neural processes contributing to event construction and elaboration, demonstrating that neural differentiation of past and future events was maximal during construction while overlap was most striking during elaboration.
Acknowledgements
We thank W. Dale Stevens for assistance with data collection, Kelly S. Giovanello, Angela Gutchess, Elizabeth Kensinger and Itamar Kahn for assistance with statistical analyses, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant MH060941 and National Institute on Aging (NIA) grant AG08441, awarded to DLS.
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