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Sketchpad Series

Neural oscillatory mechanisms of autobiographical memory and future imagination: a MEG study

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

Isaac Kinley^1,2 (isaac.kinley@gmail.com), Reece P Roberts³, Jed Meltzer¹, Donna Rose Addis^1,2,3; ¹Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, ²University of Toronto, ³The University of Auckland

Neuroimaging research on memory and imagination has revealed that these processes rely on many of the same neural structures, particularly those within the default mode network. Nevertheless, previous fMRI findings have found neural differences, with stronger activity during imagining versus remembering occurring primarily during event construction (when searching for an event representation) as opposed to elaboration (when adding details to a schematic event scaffold). Relatively less is known about the neural oscillatory mechanisms that enable the brain to remember the past and imagine the future. Recent EEG results from our group suggest that a suppression of mid-frontal theta power occurs during the transition from construction to elaboration, and that the magnitude of this suppression is greater for imagination than memory reflecting the greater cognitive demands in imagination versus memory. In this talk, we will report results from an ongoing MEG study in which participants recall autobiographical memories of past events, imagine personal future events, or engage in a non-autobiographical object imagery and internal speech control task. We will leverage the spatial resolution of MEG to examine theta phase synchronization between medial temporal and medial prefrontal regions during the transition. Such synchronization, which we expect to find during both memory and imagination, may enable medial-prefrontal-dependent schematic representations to coordinate the hippocampus-dependent process of binding details in a coherent event representation. More broadly, this study represents a step toward the use of high-temporal resolution methods to examine slower cognitive processes such as autobiographical memory and imagination.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic