We hypothesized that increased activity during encoding in cortical regions previously identified as part of a network that supports contextual processing54,55 would predict subsequent false recognition of contextually related objects,

and the results supported this hypothesis. Perhaps most important from an adaptive Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical perspective, encoding-related activity in the retrosplenial complex predicted subsequent false recognition of contextually related objects. Bar and Aminoff54 have theorized that this region is involved in the processing of “context frames,” which represent generic or prototypical information about a context. Activation of a context frame during encoding is adaptive because it can facilitate recognition of other objects Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in the LEE011 chemical structure environment by allowing predictions about what is likely to occur in a particular context.56 These studies provide compelling evidence favoring

an adaptive account of gist-based and associative errors. Schacter et al15 also discussed additional evidence and ideas that point toward an adaptive interpretation for other kinds of memory distortions, including post-event misinformation effects10 and imagination inflation,57-59 where Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical imagining events can lead to false beliefs and memories that they did occur. Our adaptive account of imagination inflation relied heavily on recent observations concerning the role of a constructive memory system in imagining future events, which will be discussed in the next section of the paper. Constructive memory and imagining the future Numerous experiments have Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical demonstrated ways in which imagining events can lead to the development of false memories for those events.57-64 During the past several years, neuroimaging studies have revealed striking overlap in the neural processes that are engaged when people remember past Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical events and imagine future events or novel scenes,65-70 and behavioral studies have documented similarly striking similarities in the corresponding cognitive

processes.18,19,71-79 The similarities documented in these studies can 4-Aminobutyrate aminotransferase help to understand why memory and imagination can be easily confused: they share common neural and cognitive underpinnings. In addition, we have argued that these observations are relevant to thinking about the adaptive functions of a constructive memory system. Specifically, Schacter and Addis18 have put forward the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, which holds that past and future events draw on similar information stored in memory (episodic memory in particular) and rely on similar underlying processes. Episodic memory, in turns, supports the construction of future events by extracting and recombining stored information into a simulation of a novel event.