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据着突出的位置。它们具有重要的适应功能，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有关，并与乐观和韧性相关。尽管未来思维对心理学和其他领域（如健康和经济学）的重要性，但我们对未来思维的认知和神经基础的理解仍处于起步阶段。过去五年的神经影像学研究结果表明，思考未来涉及到一组核心的大脑区域，这些区域传统上与情景记忆有关。这些发现表明，记忆过去和展望未来的能力之间存在直接联系。然而，神经影像学证据在本质上是相关的，因果关系的推断只能从病变研究中得出。此外，尽管每一个未来的模拟，就像每一个生活的经验，福尔斯某处沿着一个情感连续体，很少有人知道情感和记忆在未来的思考中的相互作用。鉴于情绪对记忆的强大影响，情绪对未来思维的类似影响的有趣可能性值得研究。目前的建议提供了第一个全面的，理论上的动机分析的未来思维的健忘症继发于内侧颞叶（MTL）病变的患者。该提案的第一部分借鉴了神经影像学研究的见解，对未来思维的中枢介导机制，以定义MTL健忘症的未来思维障碍的范围，并确定可能改善障碍的干预措施。该提案的第二部分通过（a）研究情绪如何调节未来思维背后的神经介导过程;（B）探索记忆障碍如何影响未来思维中通常明显的情绪偏见，来研究情绪和记忆在未来思维中的相互作用。鉴于杏仁核在记忆的情绪调节中的作用，我们重点比较了MTL病变仅限于海马复合体和病变延伸到海马复合体以外的杏仁核的患者的表现。在第三部分的建议，我们评估的适应性价值的记忆为未来导向的行为，通过检查的条件下，MTL健忘症影响决策。包括本建议的研究提供了一个原则性的方法来衡量未来的思维障碍，从MTL病变和理论为基础的补救方法的结果的范围。他们还提供了第一个系统的探索如何未来的思想情绪属性调制MTL相关的未来思维障碍。最后，通过揭示与MTL相关的记忆障碍对未来导向行为的影响，这些研究将为记忆的适应功能提供新的视角。我们预计，这些发现将对理解各种神经和精神疾病人群中面向未来的思维和行为障碍具有重要意义。!

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. !