Characterizing Strategy Use During the Performance of Hippocampal-Dependent Tasks

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Ian A. Clark¹  Anna M. Monk¹  Eleanor A. Maguire¹ 

[1] Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, United Kingdom

关键词: cognitive strategies;    visual imagery;    hippocampus;    scene construction;    autobiographical memory;    future thinking;    navigation;    individual differences;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02119

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Recalling the past, thinking about the future, and navigating in the world are linked with a brain structure called the hippocampus. Precisely, how the hippocampus enables these critical cognitive functions is still debated. The strategies people use to perform tasks associated with these functions have been under-studied, and yet, such information could augment our understanding of the associated cognitive processes and neural substrates. Here, we devised and deployed an in-depth protocol to examine the explicit strategies used by 217 participants to perform four naturalistic tasks widely acknowledged to be hippocampal-dependent, namely, those assessing scene imagination, autobiographical memory recall, future thinking, and spatial navigation. In addition, we also investigated strategy use for three laboratory-based memory tasks, one of which is held to be hippocampal-dependent – concrete verbal paired associates (VPA) – and two tasks, which are likely hippocampal-independent – abstract VPA and the dead or alive semantic memory test. We found that scene visual imagery was the dominant strategy not only when mentally imagining scenes, but also during autobiographical memory recall, when thinking about the future and during navigation. Moreover, scene visual imagery strategies were used most frequently during the concrete VPA task, whereas verbal strategies were most prevalent for the abstract VPA task and the dead or alive semantic memory task. The ubiquity of specifically scene visual imagery use across a range of tasks may attest to its, perhaps underappreciated, importance in facilitating cognition, while also aligning with perspectives that emphasize a key role for the hippocampus in constructing scene imagery.

【 授权许可】

CC BY