Trends in Parking: Future Thinking

Traditional analyses of autobiographical construction have tended to focus on the ‘internal’ or episodic details of the narrative. Contemporary studies employing fine-grained scoring measures, however, reveal the ‘external’ component of autobiographical narratives to contain important information relevant to the individual’s life story. Here, we used the recently developed NExt scoring protocol to explore profiles of external details generated by patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) (n = 11) and semantic dementia (SD) (n = 13) on a future thinking task. Voxel-based morphometry analyses of structural MRI were used to determine the neural correlates of external detail profiles in each patient group. Overall, distinct NExt profiles were observed across past and future temporal contexts in AD and SD groups, which involved elevations in external details, in the context of reduced internal details, relative to healthy Controls. Specifically, AD patients provided significantly more General Semantic details compared with Controls during past retrieval, whereas Specific Episode external details were elevated during future simulation. These increased external details within future narratives related to grey matter integrity in medial and lateral frontal regions in AD. By contrast, SD patients displayed an elevation of Specific Episode, Extended Episode, and General Semantic details exclusively during future simulation relative to Controls, which related to integrity of medial and lateral parietal regions. Our findings suggest that the compensatory external details generated during future simulation comprise an array of episodic and semantic details that vary in terms of specificity and self-relevance. Moreover, these profiles appear to be differentially affected depending on the locus of underlying neuropathology in dementia. Adopting a fine-grained approach to external details provides important information regarding the interplay between episodic and semantic content during future stimulation and highlights the differential vulnerability and preservation of distinct components of the constructed narrative in clinical disorders.

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Emotional mental imagery generation during spontaneous future thinking: relationship with optimism and negative mood

Psychological Research ◽

10.1007/s00426-021-01501-w ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Julie L. Ji ◽

Fionnuala C. Murphy ◽

Ben Grafton ◽

Colin MacLeod ◽

Emily A. Holmes

Keyword(s):

Mental Imagery ◽

Negative Mood ◽

Future Thinking

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The face of future: Face expressions during future thinking

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology ◽

10.1177/1747021821992991 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 174702182199299

Author(s):

Mohamad El Haj ◽

Emin Altintas ◽

Ahmed A Moustafa ◽

Abdel Halim Boudoukha

Keyword(s):

Facial Expression ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Emotional Experience ◽

Future Scenarios ◽

Future Thinking ◽

Analysis Software ◽

Emotional Facial Expressions ◽

Facial Analysis ◽

The Face ◽

Face Expressions

Future thinking, which is the ability to project oneself forward in time to pre-experience an event, is intimately associated with emotions. We investigated whether emotional future thinking can activate emotional facial expressions. We invited 43 participants to imagine future scenarios, cued by the words “happy,” “sad,” and “city.” Future thinking was video recorded and analysed with a facial analysis software to classify whether facial expressions (i.e., happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and neutral facial expression) of participants were neutral or emotional. Analysis demonstrated higher levels of happy facial expressions during future thinking cued by the word “happy” than “sad” or “city.” In contrast, higher levels of sad facial expressions were observed during future thinking cued by the word “sad” than “happy” or “city.” Higher levels of neutral facial expressions were observed during future thinking cued by the word “city” than “happy” or “sad.” In the three conditions, the neutral facial expressions were high compared with happy and sad facial expressions. Together, emotional future thinking, at least for future scenarios cued by “happy” and “sad,” seems to trigger the corresponding facial expression. Our study provides an original physiological window into the subjective emotional experience during future thinking.

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The relationship between hippocampal-dependent task performance and hippocampal grey matter myelination and iron content

Brain and Neuroscience Advances ◽

10.1177/23982128211011923 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

pp. 239821282110119

Author(s):

Ian A. Clark ◽

Martina F. Callaghan ◽

Nikolaus Weiskopf ◽

Eleanor A. Maguire

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Autobiographical Memory ◽

Task Performance ◽

Iron Content ◽

Grey Matter ◽

Cognitive Task ◽

Spatial Navigation ◽

Imaging Data ◽

Future Thinking

Individual differences in scene imagination, autobiographical memory recall, future thinking and spatial navigation have long been linked with hippocampal structure in healthy people, although evidence for such relationships is, in fact, mixed. Extant studies have predominantly concentrated on hippocampal volume. However, it is now possible to use quantitative neuroimaging techniques to model different properties of tissue microstructure in vivo such as myelination and iron. Previous work has linked such measures with cognitive task performance, particularly in older adults. Here we investigated whether performance on scene imagination, autobiographical memory, future thinking and spatial navigation tasks was associated with hippocampal grey matter myelination or iron content in young, healthy adult participants. Magnetic resonance imaging data were collected using a multi-parameter mapping protocol (0.8 mm isotropic voxels) from a large sample of 217 people with widely-varying cognitive task scores. We found little evidence that hippocampal grey matter myelination or iron content were related to task performance. This was the case using different analysis methods (voxel-based quantification, partial correlations), when whole brain, hippocampal regions of interest, and posterior:anterior hippocampal ratios were examined, and across different participant sub-groups (divided by gender and task performance). Variations in hippocampal grey matter myelin and iron levels may not, therefore, help to explain individual differences in performance on hippocampal-dependent tasks, at least in young, healthy individuals.

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