Search

Evidence suggests that memory is involved in making simulations and predictions about the future (i.e., future thinking), but less work has examined how the outcome of those predictions (whether events play out as predicted or expected) subsequently affects episodic memory. In this investigation, we examine whether memory is better for outcomes that are consistent with predictions, or whether memory is enhanced for outcomes that are inconsistent with predictions, after the predicted event occurs. In this experiment, participants learned a core trait associated with social targets (e.g., high in extroversion), before making predictions about behaviors targets would perform. Participants then were shown behaviors the social targets actually performed (i.e., prediction outcome), which was either consistent or inconsistent with predictions. After that, participants completed a memory test (recognition; recall) for the prediction outcomes. For recognition, the results revealed better memory for outcomes that were consistent with traits associated with targets (i.e., trait‐consistent outcomes), compared to outcomes that were inconsistent (i.e., trait‐inconsistent outcomes). Finding a memory advantage for trait‐consistent outcomes suggests that outcomes that are in line with the contents of memory (e.g., what one knows; schemas) are more readily remembered than those that are inconsistent with memory, which may reflect an adaptive memory process. For recall, memory did not differ between trait‐consistent and trait‐inconsistent outcomes. Altogether, the results of this experiment advance understanding of the reciprocal relationship between episodic memory and future thinking and show that outcome of predictions has an influence on subsequent episodic memory, at least as measured by recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has reported that walking through a doorway to a new location makes memory for objects and events experienced in the previous location less accurate. This effect, termed the location updating effect, has been used to suggest that location changes are used to mark boundaries between events in memory: memories for objects encountered within the current event are more available than those from beyond an event boundary. Within a computer‐generated memory task, participants navigated through virtual rooms, walking through doorways, and interacting with objects. The accuracy and their subjective experience of their memory for the objects (remember/know and confidence) were assessed. The findings showed that shifts in location decreased accurate responses associated with the subjective experience of remembering but not those associated with the experience of knowing, even when considering only the most confident responses in each condition. These findings demonstrate that a shift in location selectively impacts recollection and so contributes to our understanding of boundaries in event memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While fMRI activation studies contrasting task conditions regularly assess the whole brain, this is usually not true for studies analyzing task-dependent brain connectivity changes by psychophysiological interactions (PPI). Here we combine standard PPI (sPPI) and generalized PPI (gPPI) with a priori brain parcellation by spatially constrained normalized cut spectral clustering (NCUT) to analyze task-dependent connectivity changes in a whole brain manner, and compare the results to multiseed conventional PPI analyses over all activation peaks in an episodic memory recall task. We show that, depending on the chosen parcellation frame, the whole-brain PPI approach is able to detect a large amount of the information that is detected by the conventional approach. Over and above, whole-brain PPI allows identification of several additional task-modulated connections, particularly from seed regions without significant activation differences between conditions. Hum Brain Mapp 35:5071-5082, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]