Episodic specificity induction and scene construction: Evidence for an event construction account

Research has suggested that an episodic specificity induction (ESI)- training in recollecting details of a past event- impacts subsequent memory, imagination, problem solving, and creativity. We have hypothesized that induction effects may be attributable to event construction- the assembly and maintenance of a mental scenario filled with setting, people, and action details. We examine whether ESI impacts metrics of event detail in a standard scene construction task, which is a paradigm focused on the spatial integrity of a mental scenario and the stage upon or setting in which such a scenario occurs. Relative to a control, ESI significantly increased details generated across all categories of event detail in scene construction, including spatial references, entities present, sensory descriptions, and thoughts/emotions/actions. ESI did not influence scores on the Spatial Coherence Index, a critical measure of spatial processing. These findings inform theoretical and functional accounts of the nature and malleability of constructive retrieval.

Boundary extension is attenuated in patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and hippocampus have been implicated in the mental construction of scenes and events. However, little is known about their specific contributions to these cognitive functions. Boundary extension (BE) is a robust indicator of fast, automatic, and implicit scene construction. BE occurs when individuals who are viewing scenes automatically imagine what might be beyond the view, and consequently later misremember having seen a greater expanse of the scene. Patients with hippocampal damage show attenuated BE because of their scene construction impairment. In the current study, we administered BE tasks to patients with vmPFC damage, brain-damaged control patients, and healthy control participants. We also contrasted the performance of these patients to the previously-published data from patients with hippocampal lesions (Mullally, Intraub, & Maguire, 2012). We found that vmPFC-damaged patients showed reduced BE compared to brain-damaged and healthy controls. Indeed, BE attenuation was similar following vmPFC or hippocampal damage. Notably, however, whereas hippocampal damage seems to particularly impair the spatial coherence of scenes, vmPFC damage leads to a difficulty constructing scenes in a broader sense, with the prediction of what should be in a scene, and the monitoring or integration of the scene elements being particularly compromised. We conclude that vmPFC and hippocampus play important and complementary roles in scene construction.

Selective effects of specificity inductions on episodic details: evidence for an event construction account

Prior research has suggested that an episodic specificity induction - brief training in recollecting the details of a past event - affects downstream performance on remembering past and imagining future events, solving problems, and thinking creatively. We have hypothesised that a process common to these tasks that the induction may target is event construction - assembling and maintaining a mental scenario filled with details related to settings, people, and actions. We test this hypothesis by having participants receive a memory specificity induction, imagination specificity induction, or control induction not requiring event construction prior to memory and imagination tasks that involve event construction, and a picture description task that involves describing but not mentally constructing an event. We predicted that induction effects would be specific to episodic detail production on subsequent memory and imagination because these details assay critical elements of a constructed event. In line with an event construction account, the two specificity inductions produced significant and indistinguishable increases in the number of episodic - but not semantic - details generated during memory and imagination relative to the control. Induction did not increase detail generation on picture description. The findings provide novel evidence that event construction is a key process targeted by specificity inductions.