The Role of Episodic Buffer in Episodic Future Thinking

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2010

The British journal of clinical psychology / the British Psychological Society, 2015

To examine the impact of memory accessibility on episodic future thinking. Single-case study of neurological patient HCM and an age-matched comparison group of neurologically Healthy Controls. We administered a full battery of tests assessing general intelligence, memory, and executive functioning. To assess autobiographical memory, the Autobiographical Memory Interview (Kopelman, Wilson, & Baddeley, 1990. The Autobiographical Memory Interview. Bury St. Edmunds, UK: Thames Valley Test Company) was administered. The Past Episodic and Future Episodic sections of Dalla Barba's Confabulation Battery (Dalla Barba, 1993, Cogn. Neuropsychol., 1, 1) and a specifically tailored Mental Time Travel Questionnaire were administered to assess future thinking in HCM and age-matched controls. HCM presented with a deficit in forming new memories (anterograde amnesia) and recalling events from before the onset of neurological impairment (retrograde amnesia). HCM's autobiographical memory impa...

Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) has been linked with our ability to remember past events. However, its specific neurocognitive subprocesses have remained elusive. In Study 1, a study of healthy older adults was conducted to investigate the candidate subprocesses of EFT. Participants completed a standard EFT cue word task, two memory measures (Verbal Paired Associates I, Source Memory) and two measures of executive function (Trail Making Test, Tower Test). In Study 2, healthy young adults also completed an EFT task and neuropsychological measures. The link between neurocognitive measures and five characteristics of EFT was investigated. Specifically, it was found that Source Memory and Trail Making Test performance predicted the episodic specificity of future events in older but not younger adults. Replicating previous findings, older adults produced future events with greater semantic but fewer episodic details when compared with young adults. These results extend the data and emphasise the importance of the multiple subprocesses underlying EFT.

Objectives To examine the impact of memory accessibility on episodic future thinking. Design Single case study of neurological patient HCM and an age-matched comparison group of neurologically healthy controls. Methods We administered a full battery of tests assessing general intelligence, memory and executive functioning. To assess autobiographical memory, the Autobiographical Memory Interview (Kopelman, Wilson & Baddeley, 1990) was administered. The Past Episodic and Future Episodic sections of Dalla Barba’s Confabulation Battery (Dalla Barba, 1993) and a specifically tailored Mental Time Travel Questionnaire were administered to assess future thinking in HCM and age-matched controls. Results HCM presented with a deficit in forming new memories (anterograde amnesia) and recalling events from before the onset of neurological impairment (retrograde amnesia). HCM’s autobiographical memory impairments are characterised by a paucity of memories from recent life. In comparison with controls, two features of his future thoughts are apparent: Reduced episodic future thinking and outdated content of his episodic future thoughts. Conclusions This paper suggests we should look beyond popular conceptualisations of the past-future relation in amnesia via focussing on reduced future thinking. Investigating both the quantity and quality of future thoughts produced by amnesic patients may lead to developments in understanding the complex nature of future thinking disorders resulting from memory impairments.

Consciousness and Cognition, 2012

We investigated the contributions of familiarity of setting, self-relevance and self-projection in time to episodic future thinking. The role of familiarity of setting was assessed, in Experiment 1, by comparing episodic future thoughts to autobiographical future events supposed to occur in unfamiliar settings. The role of self-relevance was assessed, in Experiment 2, by comparing episodic future thoughts to future events involving familiar others. The role of self-projection in time was assessed, in both Experiments, by comparing episodic future thoughts to autobiographical events that were not temporal in nature. Results indicated that episodic future thoughts were more clearly represented than autobiographical future events occurring in unfamiliar setting and future events involving familiar others. Our results also revealed that episodic future thoughts were indistinguishable from autobiographical atemporal events with respect to both subjective and objective detail ratings. These results suggest that future and atemporal events are mentally represented in a similar way.

Neuropsychologia, 2007

Citation: La Corte V and Piolino P (2016) On the Role of Personal Semantic Memory and Temporal Distance in Episodic Future Thinking: The TEDIFT Model. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 10:385.

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016

Episodic future thinking (EFT), the ability to project into the future to “preexperience” an event, and prospective memory (PM), remembering to perform an intended action, are both examples of future-oriented cognition. Recently it has been suggested that EFT might contribute to PM performance but to date few studies have examined the relationship between these two capacities. The aim of the present study was to investigate the nature and specificity of this relationship, as well as whether it varies with age. Participants were 125 younger and 125 older adults who completed measures of EFT and PM. Significant, positive correlations between EFT and PM were identified in both age groups. Furthermore, EFT ability accounted for significant unique variance in the young adults, suggesting that it may make a specific contribution to PM function. Within the older adult group, EFT did not uniquely contribute to PM, possibly indicating a reduced capacity to utilize EFT, or the use of compensa...

PSYCHOLOGIA, 2012

Recent studies have documented cognitive and neural processes related to human abilities for prospection and prospective memory. In this review article, I discuss functional neuroimaging findings on these two inter-related neurocognitive processes in humans, which are both thought to develop in relation to episodic memory. Prospection is the ability to construct ideas about possible future events, whereas prospective memory involves the formation and encoding of personal behavioural plans that are then maintained and retrieved at a planned time (or condition) during other ongoing activities. A growing body of neuroimaging studies investigating human prospection has consistently identified a core brain network consisting of medial regions of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. The medial prefrontal cortex has also been identified to play a significant role for executive processes in prospective memory. Further investigations will be needed to disambiguate the contributions of the medial temporal lobe in constructing, encoding, and remembering future plans.