Results showed that the core network identified

in previous studies, including the hippocampus, was active when participants imagined future events (Figure 1). Critically, we also found that simulations classified as “remembered” based on subsequent recall performance were associated with greater activity in right hippocampus at the time of necessary encoding than were simulations that were classified as “forgotten” (Figure 2). Further, we found that participants rated the successfully remembered simulations as more detailed than simulations that were subsequently forgotten, and that activation in brain Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical regions that showed an encoding effect was Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical modulated by the level of detail. These observations suggest

that constructing a lasting “memory for the future” is related to how well details comprising a simulation were retrieved from memory and recombined during encoding. Figure 1. Regions of a core network engaged by imagining future events. In a recent study described in the text,87 participants imagined future events including person, place, and object details that were taken from actual memories. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical On control inhibitor 17-AAG trials, participants … Figure 2. Hippocampal responses to encoding. In the same study described in Figure 1,87 approximately 10 minutes after imagining future events comprised of person, place, and object details, participants were given a cued recall test in which two details from … Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical In a related line of research on another aspect of “memory of the future,” Szpunar et al91 have examined how well individuals remember simulations of positive, negative, or neutral simulations of possible future events. Episodic simulations typically refer to emotionally arousing events: recent evidence indicates Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical that roughly two thirds of thoughts about everyday future

events are either positively or negatively charged.92 To investigate memory for such simulations, we used a variant of the experimental recombination-subsequent memory procedure used by Martin et al87 in the previously described study in which participants imagined future events comprised of recombined person, location, and object details. Each recombined set of details was presented along with one of three emotional tags — either positive, negative, Brefeldin_A or neutral. On each trial, participants were instructed to generate a plausible future event that might occur within the next 5 years and that would evoke in them the emotion indicated by the emotional tag. Memory was tested either after a 10-minute delay or a 1-day delay using the cued recall procedure described above, ie, participants were provided with two details from the simulation and were instructed to recall the third detail (no scanning was performed in this experiment).