Medial Temporal Lobe Contributions to Future Thinking: Evidence from Amnesia

描述(由申请人提供)： 面向未来的思维在自发的心理活动中占有突出的地位。它们发挥着重要的适应功能，因为它们使我们能够代表多种假设结果，并根据这些预期结果采取行动。面向未来的思维方式与总体幸福感联系在一起，与乐观和韧性相关。尽管未来思维对于心理学和其他领域很重要，在这些领域，对未来结果的信念对行为至关重要，比如健康和经济学，但我们对未来思维的认知和神经基础的理解仍处于初级阶段。过去五年的神经成像研究结果表明，思考未来涉及一组大脑核心区域，这些区域传统上与情节记忆有关。这些发现表明，记忆过去的能力和展望未来的能力之间存在直接联系。然而，神经影像证据本质上是相关的，因果推论只能从病变研究中得出。此外，尽管每一次未来的模拟，就像每一次活着的经历一样，都是沿着情感连续体的某个地方进行的，但人们对情感和记忆在未来思维中的相互作用知之甚少。鉴于情感对记忆的强大影响，情感对未来思维产生类似影响的耐人寻味的可能性值得研究。目前的提案提供了第一个全面的，理论上有动机的分析，对继发于内侧颞叶(MTL)病变的健忘症患者的未来思维进行分析。该提案的第一部分借鉴了关于海马体介导的未来思维机制的神经成像研究的见解，以确定MTL健忘症中未来思维障碍的范围，并确定可能改善这种障碍的干预措施。该提案的第二部分通过以下方式研究情绪和记忆在未来思维中的相互作用：(A)研究情绪如何调节未来思维背后的海马体介导的过程；以及(B)探索记忆障碍如何影响未来思维中通常明显的情绪偏差。考虑到杏仁核在记忆的情绪调节中的作用，我们重点比较了仅限于海马复合体的MTL损害患者和其损害超出海马复合体包括杏仁核的患者的表现。在提案的第三部分，我们通过考察MTL健忘症影响决策的条件来评估记忆对面向未来的行为的适应性价值。组成这项建议的研究提供了一种原则性的方法来衡量MTL损害导致的未来思维障碍的范围，并提供了一种基于理论的补救方法。他们还首次系统地探索了未来思维的情感属性如何调节未来思维中与MTL相关的损害。最后，通过揭示MTL相关的记忆损伤对未来定向行为的影响，这些研究将为记忆的适应功能提供新的启示。我们预计，这些发现将对理解各种神经学和精神病学人群中面向未来的思维和行为障碍具有重要意义。好了！

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Future-oriented thoughts occupy a prominent position in spontaneous mental activity. They serve an important adaptive function, in that they enable us to represent multiple hypothetical outcomes and act in light of those anticipated outcomes. A future-oriented thinking style has been linked with general wellbeing and correlates with optimism and resilience. Despite the importance of future thinking to psychology and other domains where beliefs about future outcomes are central to behavior, such as health and economics, our understanding of the cognitive and neural bases of future thinking is still in its infancy. Neuroimaging findings over te past five years have shown that thinking about the future engages a core set of brain regions that have traditionally been associated with episodic remembering. Such findings suggest a direct link between the ability to remember the past and to envision the future. However, neuroimaging evidence is correlational in nature, and causal inferences can only be drawn from lesion studies. Further, despite the fact that every future simulation, just like every lived experience, falls somewhere along an affective continuum, little is known about the interplay of emotion and memory in future thinking. Given the powerful influences of emotion on memory, the intriguing possibility of similar influences of emotion on future thinking merits study. The current proposal provides the first comprehensive, theoretically motivated analysis of future thinking in patients with amnesia secondary to medial temporal lobe (MTL) lesions. The first part of the proposal draws on insights from neuroimaging studies regarding hippocampally-mediated mechanisms of future thinking to define the scope of the future-thinking impairment in MTL amnesia and to identify interventions that may ameliorate the impairment. The second part of the proposal examines the interplay of emotion and memory in future thinking by (a) examining how emotion modulates hippocampally-mediated processes underlying future thinking; and (b) exploring how memory impairment affects emotional biases that are typically evident in future thinking. Given the role of the amygdala in the emotional modulation of memory, we focus on a comparison of the performance of patients with MTL lesions limited to the hippocampal complex and patients whose lesions extend beyond the hippocampal complex to include the amygdala. In the third part of the proposal, we evaluate the adaptive value of memory for future-oriented behavior by examining conditions in which MTL amnesia impacts decision making. The studies comprising this proposal provide a principled way to gauge the scope of the future thinking impairment that results from MTL lesions and a theoretically based approach to remediation. They also provide the first systematic exploration of how the emotional attributes of future thought modulate the MTL-associated impairment in future thinking. Finally, by revealing the impact of the MTL-associated memory impairment on future-oriented behaviors, these studies will shed novel light on the adaptive function of memory. We anticipate that these findings will have important implications for understanding impairments in future-oriented thought and behavior in a variety of neurological and psychiatric populations. !