Lecture 11 Flashcards
What is future thinking? Examples?
● Refers to the ability to imagine events in the future ○ Can be semantic or episodic
we can think about our future semantically or episodically.
I know I want to live near the beach in 10 years (semantic)
I can imagine living on the beach in 10 years, feeling the sand between my toes (episodic)
many of us can close our eyes and picture laying on the beach etc.
How often do we engage in future thinking?
her lab thinks about how people remember and how people imagine their future. People typically spend most of their focusing on their future. our minds wandering away is actually not necessarily a bad thing. It has a lot of adaptive value. Don’t be so hard on yourself when your mind is wandering.
we are thinking about the future 30% of the time
Tulving and amnesic patient K.C. (1985)
-Motorcycle accident at age 30 -Damage to his hippocampus and other regions
-Severely amnesic
endel tulving conducted an interview with a patient who went by K.C. he was in a motor vehicle accident around the age of 30. K.C. became severely amnesic. There is a 6 part series on youtube where this screenshot comes from. You can see that endel tulving is really trying to understand the nature of K.C.’s impairment. His semantic memory and procedural memory are pretty intact. BUT episodic memory is really impacted. Endel tulving asks him about the future and theres a pause and then K.C. say I don’t know, endel tulving remembers tomorrow. K.C. says his state of mind will be blank tmrw. K.C. could not think about his future. This was an anecdote but years later some researchers decided to examine the relationship between memory and future thinking. Perhaps when you have damage to your hippocampus etc. you are not able to project memories into the future.
What kind of deficits does medial temporal lobe damage cause?
This relates to the race et al study
deficits in episodic memory and episodic future thinking not attributable to deficits in narrative construction
What was the goal of the race et al study?
“The current study investigates the nature and necessity of MTL involvement in future thinking by testing the ability of amnesic patients with well characterized MTL lesions to construct narratives about (1) recent/remote past events, (2) near/distant future events, and (3) visually presented pictures.”
we need to match these patients to controls and be as well matched as possible for gender, etc.
Take home: A group of patients were tested as well as well-matched healthy controls
what we can see is we have number of patients, listed by their IDs, there are 8 patients which is a large sample size for amnesia. Why would we put together a table like this? So we can quickly look at it and get a lot of information. Maybe the greater than volume loss might indicate worse impairments. There is only percentages reported for 4 of the 8 patients. Either you have a scan or you don’t and it can either be a good scan or a grainy low resolution scan. Sometimes patients can’t be in the MRI because of pacemakers etc., sometimes you only have a clinical scan which is low resolution. This is usually computed relative to a control group.
What was the task?
● (1) Describe past events
● (2) Describe future events
● (3) Describe a picture
they had their patients and their control come into the lab and complete a series of tasks often across multiple days. They did a describe past events, a describe future events, and a describe a picture. Think back to a time in your life and tell me all the details about that specific event. A picture condition task is examining their ability to draw on longterm memory, hold that information in their working memory (aka keep in mind what you said, what you have to say next), can you do that? we ask you to answer that question where we give them a task where they have all the pieces in front of them and you ask them to tell a story. This helps you rule out if impairment is specific to pulling from memory and using that to generate something new or if they just struggle to construct a narrative in general.
Question: What was the purpose of the picture description task?
it didn’t matter if they were asking abotu something that just happened, happened a long time ago, was tomorrow, or was farther in the future. The controls in the black produce many more details than the non-controls. Patients are impaired across the board. The patient understands the task and are providing some details but their narratives are much much shorter. Less than half of that in the controls.
Take home: Patients could not recollect past events or imagine future ones
Take home: Patients had no trouble describing a picture!
the patients have no problem with this task. Patients and controls are both producing about 24 23 details. So the patients are performing at the level of controls for this task.
Take home: Future thinking was correlated with memory but not picture description
The correlation provides evidence that (episodic) memory and future thinking are linked
the researchers went on to do one more thing. Is the extend of what they were able to do in the past correlated with what they were able to do in the future. In the control group, the control who produces the most details in memory is also the control that produces the most details in future thinking. You also see a prety tight correlation for the patients as well. AKA patient wiht most profound amnesia is also the patient who performs the worst on future thinking. This tells you that future thinking probably does have something to do with memory. BUT these correlations dont exist for the picture narrative.
● “In conclusion, the current results indicate that the MTL is critical for constructing event simulations when descriptive elements are not readily available, and suggest that the MTL may be particularly important for constructing future event representations that are both detailed and specific.”
One question that often comes up is are they more impaired if you ask them to generate the future more semantically? They are actually okay at that.
Are our brains activating the same way when imaging the future and the past?
our brain is actually activating really similar regions when we are thinking about the past and the future.
is thinking about the future uniquely human?
“To protect their cache, scrub jays preferentially select storage locations that are out of sight of pilfering birds [62]. Moreover, if the scrub jays have experience of pilfering the food of others, they will recache their own food if another bird was present when they first stored the food, as if to protect it from future theft [62].”
WATCH THE VIDEO
What is episodic future thinking?
what are the functions of this?
thinking about going to a concert in the future
far sighted decision making
emotion regulation
prospective memory
spatial navigation
“To protect their cache, scrub jays preferentially select storage locations that are out of sight of pilfering birds [62]. Moreover, if the scrub jays have experience of pilfering the food of others, they will recache their own food if another bird was present when they first stored the food, as if to protect it from future theft [62].”
Do impairments in future thinking have implications for decision making?
$30 now vs. $54 in 2 weeks, 54 in 2 years (inter-temporal choice task)
she gave amnesic patients a decision making tasks. We discount the future to account for its delay in arrival. In general when we give these kinds of tasks to humans, people tend to prefer the smaller sooner reward, This is called temporal discounting.
we tested 9 patients. What you are seeing in these scans is their damage. Some patients had large lesions, some had really small ones specific to the hippocampus. All of them had a damaged hippocampus.
baseline condition: would you prefer 30 now or 34 in 6 months
if you give patients this intertemporal choice task, they do just fine. If controls choose the larger later reward on 50% of the trials so do the patients. She wanted to design the task differently and wanted to say what if we make the task more dependent on future thinking. She asked if she made the task more heavily dependent on future thinking would patients be more impaired?
“imagine future” condition: imagine an event in a specific spatial location
they imagine themselves at a bar with their friends in six month, then do the choice task. In the baseline version of the task where they weren’t asked to imagine the future, they were the same as controls. But when you give them the future thinking variant because the patients can’t do that very well this will be less effective as this task. This is like a priming taks that biases their decisions.
they also correlated the amount of percpetually rich details they came up with and correlated it with their change in score from their baseline. People with amnesia are less likely to be primed.
Key takeaways: imagining the future is really important for some forms of decision making.
