Future-Thinking

Question 1

Future Thinking: refers to… + can be…

Answer 1

• Refers to the ability to imagine events in the future
• Can be semantic or episodic

Question 2

How often do we engage in future thinking?

Answer 2

30% of our spontaneous cognition

Question 3

What did Tulving conclude about amnesia during his conversations with K.C.?

Answer 3

Tulving thought that amnesia might not only affect your memory of the past, but your ability to look forward; future thinking (e.g. how K.C. describes his mind feeling “blank” when being asked to think about the future)

Question 4

Goal of study

Answer 4

• Looked at the nature and necessity of MTL involvement in future thinking

Question 5

Goal of study - measuring MTL involvement HOW?

Constructing narratives about 3 things

Answer 5

Testing the ability of amnesic patients with well-characterized MTL lesions to construct narratives about

1. Recent/remote past events
2. Near/distant future events
3. Visually presented pictures

Question 6

Findings - building narratives: how did patients do?

Answer 6

Patients can do the task, but not as well as the control individuals (i.e. those without amnesia)

Question 7

Findings - building narratives: the # of details recalled by patients related to WHICH theory reviewed previously?

Answer 7

• On bar graph, control individuals showed variation in their # of details recalled
• However, amnesic patients did not - showing a completely flat line
• THIS GOES BACK TO HOW WE LEARNED ABOUT MULTIPLE TRACE THEORY

Question 8

Findings - correlations?

Answer 8

• If memory and future thinking are linked, they should be correlated
• Found that the person with the worst future-thinking, also had the worst memory

Question 9

Broader take home?

Answer 9

• when you have damage to the hippocampus and MTL, you’ll have damages to memory
• this can impact future-thinking AND how a dual impairment in memory and future thinking cannot be explained by a deficit in narrative construction

Question 10

Neuroimaging - overlap?

What activates for past- and future-thinking?

Answer 10

Thinking about the past and the future both activate the same default mode network

Question 11

Is future-thinking uniquely human?

Scrub-Jay example

Answer 11

• NO
• If scrub jays have experience of stealing the food of others, they will recache their own food if another bird was present when they first stored the food, as if to protect it from future theft

Question 12

Do impairments in future-thinking have implications for decision-making? Q ASKED

Answer 12

Would you prefer…

• $30 now
• $54 in 2 weeks
• $54 in 2 years

Question 13

Do impairments in future-thinking have implications for decision-making? experimental condition - additional q asked?

Answer 13

• Control individuals tasked to imagine/consider the future
• Supposedly would influence or change their decision-making; but how would this work for individuals who have future-thinking impairments?

Question 14

Do impairments in future-thinking have implications for decision-making? RESULTS

Answer 14

• Patients with amnesia did not have their decisions impacted when imagining the future
• **Also saw a relationship between controls who were the best at this future thinking task were the ones who showed the largest shift in their baseline **