Schedule of Events | Symposia

Dynamic Recruitment of Category-Selective Cortex During Episodic Retrieval and Future Thinking

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

Sarah E. Kalinowski¹ (skalinowski@fas.harvard.edu), Adrian W. Gilmore², Christopher Sokol¹, Alex Martin³, Daniel L. Schacter¹; ¹Harvard University, ²University of Delaware, ³National Institute of Mental Health

Episodic retrieval and episodic future thinking are supported by sustained activity in a common core network of brain regions. These and other findings support the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, which suggests that future thinking relies on details from episodic memory that are flexibly recombined to form novel future events (Schacter & Addis, 2007, 2020). Recent advances in preprocessing make it possible to record participants’ verbal reports during scanning, enabling the decomposition of events into their constituent details. Using this approach, it has been shown that episodic retrieval involves the dynamic recruitment of category-selective brain regions when remembering details about people, locations, and objects (Gilmore et al., 2021). In this study, we extend these findings to episodic future thinking. Participants overtly recalled past events and imagined future events for two minutes while undergoing an fMRI scan. Verbal reports were analyzed using an adapted Autobiographical Interview protocol to generate event regressors for specific detail types. A subset of participants also underwent a localizer scan to identify category-selective regions. Across both past and future events, participants primarily produced perceptual and action details, followed by objects, people, and locations. Neuroimaging results confirm sustained core network activity during both episodic retrieval and future thinking. Preliminary findings also suggest that future-event details, like past-event details, are represented in category-selective cortex. This study is the first to assess whether individual details composing both past and future events are supported by shared category-selective regions, providing evidence for the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic