Schedule of Events | Symposia

Does the hippocampus contribute to the online construction of mental simulations?

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Elizabeth Race¹ (elizabeth.race@tufts.edu), Bridget Logan², Caroline Strang², Mieke Verfaellie²; ¹Tufts University, ²VA Boston Healthcare System and Boston University School of Medicine

Amnesic patients with hippocampal damage have difficulty reconstructing events from the past as well as constructing scenarios about the future. Such observations have supported the proposal that the role of the hippocampus extends beyond the domain of memory to imagination and mental simulation. An important outstanding question is whether the hippocampus also supports the spontaneous use of imagery during the online construction of mental simulations. The current study tested this hypothesis in the domain of language comprehension. Amnesic patients with hippocampal damage and healthy controls performed a sentence-picture verification task in which they read sentences describing an object in a certain location (Experiment 1) or in a certain lighting (Experiment 2). Following presentation of the sentence, an object was presented and participants judged whether it had been mentioned in the sentence. Objects mentioned in the sentence were shown with their appearance (i.e., its shape in Experiment 1 or coloring in Experiment 2) matching or mismatching the meaning implied by the sentence. Results of linear mixed modeling indicated that in both experiments, responses were faster when the pictured object’s shape/coloring matched the shape/coloring implied by the sentence compared to when it mismatched, suggesting that participants mentally simulate the representation implied by the sentence. Importantly, this response time facilitation did not differ between patients and controls. These results suggest that the hippocampus is not necessary for the online construction of mental simulations during language comprehension.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic