Investigating the representational structure of episodic simulation: a behavioral, neuro-cognitive, and developmental approach.

人类的大脑有一种惊人的能力，可以毫不费力地离开当下。我们似乎可以自由地“旅行”到我们从未去过的地方和我们从未经历过的时代。人类的认知系统是如何实现这一壮举的？越来越多来自认知心理学、神经心理学和认知神经科学的证据表明，我们在心理上离开此时此地的不同方式依赖于一种整合的认知机制：情景模拟。为了建立这一概念，这一领域的大多数研究都集中在不同类型的“心理旅行”之间的相似性上。然而，这在很大程度上无法解释是什么让情景模拟产生了如此多不同类型的心理事件模拟。毕竟，我们可以想象未来和过去；想象真实的和可能发生的事件。因此，拟议的项目试图调查这个问题：在不同类型的情景模拟的表征结构之下是什么认知机制？为此，我将使用来自认知心理学、认知衰老研究和认知神经科学的工具。首先，研究1将调查未来和过去的情景模拟认知如何实现它们的“时态”（即它们在主观时间中的位置）。接下来，研究2将试图确定这种“时态”是否在认知上独立于给定模拟的其他特征（例如它是“记忆”还是“想象”）。为了研究认知机制在多大程度上使我们能够区分不同种类的模拟随着年龄的变化，研究3将在健康的老年人人群中复制这些发现。最后，研究4将使用功能神经成像（fMRI）和多变量模式相似性分析来检查情景模拟的表征结构的神经实现。因此，这个项目有望回答一个问题，即单一的神经认知机制是如何让我们在如此多的不同方向上离开现在的。

The human mind has the astonishing ability to effortlessly leave the present moment. We can seemingly freely 'travel' to places we have never visited and times we have never lived through. How does the human cognitive system achieve this feat? An increasing amount of evidence from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that the different ways in which we can mentally travel away from the here and now rely on one integrated cognitive mechanism: episodic simulation. In order to establish this concept, most research in this domain has focused on the similarities between different kinds of "mental travel". This, however, has left largely unexplained what allows episodic simulation to produce so many different kinds of mental event simulations. We can, after all, imagine the future and the past; imagine actual and possible events. The proposed project seeks to therefore investigate this question: what cognitive mechanisms underly the representational structure of different kinds of episodic simulation? To do so, I will use tools from cognitive psychology, cognitive aging research, and cognitive neuroscience. First, Study 1 will investigate how episodic simulations of the future and the past cognitive achieve their 'tense' (i.e. their place in subjective time). Next, Study 2 will seek to determine to whether this 'tense' is cognitively determined independently of other features of a given simulation (such as whether it is 'remembered' or 'imagined'). In order to investigate to what extent the cognitive machinery allowing us to distinguish different kinds of simulations from each other changes with age, Study 3 will replicate these findings in a population of healthy older adults. Finally, Study 4, will use functional neuroimaging (fMRI) together with multi-variate pattern similarity analysis to examine the neural implementation of the representational structure of episodic simulations. As a result, this project promises to contribute to an answer to the question of how a single neurocognitive mechanism allows us to leave the present in so many different directions.