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Creativity relies on a diverse set of cognitive processes associated with distinct neural correlates, and one important aspect of creativity, divergent thinking, has been associated with the hippocampus. However, hippocampal contributions to another important aspect of creativity, convergent problem solving, have not been investigated. We tested the necessity of hippocampus for convergent problem solving using a neuropsychological method. Participants with amnesia due to hippocampal damage (N = 5) and healthy normal comparison participants (N = 5) were tested using a task that promoted solutions based on existing knowledge (Bowden and Jung-Beeman, 2003). During each trial, participants were given a list of three words (e.g., fly, man, place) and asked to respond with a word that could be combined with each of the three words (e.g., fire). The amnesic group produced significantly fewer correct responses than the healthy comparison group. These findings indicate that the hippocampus is necessary for normal convergent problem solving and that changes in the status of the hippocampus should affect convergent problem solving in the context of creative problem-solving across short intervals. This proposed contribution of the hippocampus to convergent problem solving is consistent with an expanded perspective on hippocampal function that acknowledges its role in cognitive processes beyond declarative memory. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., (© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Converging evidence points to a neural network that supports a range of abilities including remembering the past, thinking about the future, and introspecting about oneself and others. Neuroimaging studies find hippocampal activation during event construction tasks, and patients with hippocampal amnesia are impaired in their ability to (re)construct events of the past and the future. Neuroimaging studies of constructed experiences similarly implicate the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but it remains unknown whether the mPFC is critical for such processes. The current study compares performance of five patients with bilateral mPFC damage, six patients with bilateral hippocampal damage, and demographically matched comparison participants on an event construction task. Participants were given a neutral cue word and asked to (re)construct events across four time conditions: real past, imagined past, imagined present, and future. These event narratives were analyzed for the number of internal and external details to quantify the extent of episodic (re)experiencing. Given the literature on the involvement of the mPFC in self-referential processing, we also analyzed the event narratives for self-references. The patients with mPFC damage did not differ from healthy comparison participants in their ability to construct highly detailed episodic events across time periods but displayed disruptions in their incorporation of the self. Patients with hippocampal damage showed the opposite pattern; they were impaired in their ability to construct highly detailed episodic events across time periods but not in their incorporation of the self. The results suggest differential contributions of hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex to the distributed neural network for various forms of self-projection., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Creativity requires the rapid combination and recombination of existing mental representations to create novel ideas and ways of thinking. The hippocampal system, through its interaction with neocortical storage sites, provides a relational database necessary for the creation, updating, maintenance, and juxtaposition of mental representations used in service of declarative memory. Given this functionality, we hypothesized that hippocampus would play a critical role in creative thinking. We examined creative thinking, as measured by verbal and figural forms of the torrance tests of creative thinking (TTCT), in a group of participants with hippocampal damage and severe declarative memory impairment as well as in a group of demographically matched healthy comparison participants. The patients with bilateral hippocampal damage performed significantly worse than comparison participants on both the verbal and figural portions of the TTCT. These findings suggest that hippocampus plays a role critical in creative thinking, adding to a growing body of work pointing to the diverse ways the hallmark processing features of hippocampus serve a variety of behaviors that require flexible cognition., (Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

A growing body of work suggests the hippocampus contributes to a variety of cognitive domains beyond its traditional role in memory. We propose that the hippocampus, in its capacity for relational binding, representational flexibility, and online maintenance and integration of multimodal relational representations, is a key contributor to language processing. Here we test the hypothesis that the online interpretation of pronouns is hippocampus-dependent. We combined eye tracking with neuropsychological methods, where participants (4 patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and severe declarative memory impairment, 4 patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex [vmPFC] damage, and healthy comparison participants) viewed a scene while listening to short dialogues introducing 2 characters; for example, Melissa is playing violin for Debbie/Danny as the sun is shining overhead. She is wearing a blue/purple dress. Consistent with previous work, analysis of eye gaze showed that younger and older healthy comparison participants and the vmPFC patients rapidly identified the intended referent of the pronoun when gender uniquely identified the referent, and when it did not, they showed a preference to interpret the pronoun as referring to the first-mentioned character. By contrast, hippocampal patients, while exhibiting a similar gender effect, exhibited significant disruptions in their ability to use information about which character had been mentioned first to interpret the pronoun. This finding suggests that the hippocampus plays a role in maintaining and integrating information even over a very short discourse history. These observed disruptions in referential processing demonstrate how promiscuously the hallmark processing features of the hippocampus are used in service of a variety of cognitive domains including language., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.)

Referring to things in the world – that woman, her idea, she – is a central component of language. Understanding reference requires the listener to keep track of the unfolding discourse history while integrating multiple sources of information to interpret the speech stream as it unfolds in time. Pronouns are a common way to establish reference. But due to their impoverished form, to understand them listeners must relate features of the pronoun (e.g., gender, animacy) with existing representations of potential discourse referents. Successful referential processing seems to place demands on memory. In a previous study, patients with hippocampal amnesia and healthy participants listened to short stories as their eye movements were monitored. When interpreting ambiguous pronouns, healthy participants demonstrated order-of-mention effects, whereby ambiguous pronouns are interpreted as referring to the first-mentioned referent in the story. By contrast, memory-impaired patients exhibited significant disruptions in their ability to use information about which character had been mentioned first to interpret pronouns. Repetition of the most salient information is a common clinical recommendation for improving pronoun resolution and communication in individuals with memory disorders (e.g., Alzheimer's disease) but this recommendation lacks an evidentiary basis. The present study seeks to determine whether the pronoun resolution performance of hippocampal patients can be improved, by repetition of the target referent, increasing its salience. Results indicate that patients with hippocampal damage demonstrate improved processing of pronouns following repetition of the target referent, but benefit from this repetition to a significantly smaller degree compared to healthy participants. These results provide further evidence for the role of the hippocampal-dependent memory system in language processing and point to the need for empirically tested communication interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives To determine whether severity of episodic prospection impairment in medial temporal lobe ( MTL) amnesia is reduced by the types of cues that are used to elicit personal future episodes and, if so, whether episodic memory impairment is similarly affected. Design Multiple case study of five individuals with MTL amnesia and healthy control participants. Methods Participants were administered two tests of episodic prospection: A commonly used Galton- Crovitz task that uses generic cues (e.g., lemon) and a novel task that includes specific, personally meaningful cues referring to planned or plausible future events (e.g., granddaughter's recital). Narratives were scored for episodic detail using the Autobiographical Interview protocol ( Levine et al., 2002), which distinguishes between internal (episodic) details and external (non-episodic) details. Results Results showed that specific, personally meaningful cues led to an appreciable reduction of episodic memory and prospection impairment in three of the amnesic cases tested. Clinical benefit from more structured, self-related cues may depend on factors such as extent of MTL damage or general severity of episodic memory and prospection impairment, highlighting the importance of methodological approaches to neuropsychological research that treat each case on an individual basis. Conclusions In cases of mild-moderate amnesia, specific, personal cues afford more detailed episodic remembering and prospective imagining than individual cue words. Practitioner points Previous reports of episodic prospection impairment in medial temporal lobe ( MTL) amnesia might misrepresent an individual case's true prospective abilities, Specific cues drawn from a patient's everyday life have greater ecological validity than the more typical generic cues used to elicit episodic prospection and can aid some individuals with MTL amnesia in the ability to imagine future experiences, Assessment and rehabilitation tools for MTL amnesic populations should attempt to minimize broad, open-ended questions and instead provide more structured and personally meaningful cues to guide responses, Further research is needed to determine case-specific characteristics that best predict benefit from specific, personal cues. These might include extent of MTL damage and overall severity of episodic memory and prospection impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]