ABSTRACT Sigmund Freud famously noted some memories are recalled with a perspective of “an observer from outside the scene”. According to Freud—and most memory researchers today—the third-person perspective occurs due to reconstructive processes at recall. An alternative possibility is that the third-person perspective have been adopted when the actual event is experienced and later recalled in...
The default mode network (DMN) involves interacting cortical areas, including the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), and subcortical areas, including the medial temporal lobe (MTL). The degree of functional connectivity (FC) within the DMN, particularly between MTL and medial-parietal subsystems, relates to episodic memory (EM) processes. However, past...
Theoretical models have suggested an association between the ongoing experience of the world from the perspective of one's own body and hippocampus-based episodic memory. This link has been supported by clinical reports of long-term episodic memory impairments in psychiatric conditions with dissociative symptoms, in which individuals feel detached from themselves as if having an out-of-body...
"Mental time travel" refers to conscious experience of remembering the personal past and imagining the personal future. Little is known about its neural correlates. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the hypothesis that mental time travel into "nonpresent" times (past and future) is enabled by a special conscious state (chronesthesia). Well-trained subjects...
Previous studies on the neural correlates of perceptual awareness implicate sensory-specific regions and higher cortical regions such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in this process. The specific role of PFC regions is, however, unknown. PFC activity could be bottom-up driven, integrating signals from sensory regions. Alternatively, PFC regions could serve more active top-down processes that...
Fronto-parietal activity has been frequently observed in fMRI and PET studies of attention, working memory, and episodic memory retrieval. Several recent fMRI studies have also reported fronto-parietal activity during conscious visual perception. A major goal of this review was to assess the degree of anatomical overlap among activation patterns associated with these four functions. A second...