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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 28, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Published on: November 30, 2018

Contextual processing in episodic future thought.

Karl K Szpunar¹, Jason C K Chan, Kathleen B McDermott

¹Department of Psychology, Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO 63130, USA. karl.szpunar@wustl.edu

Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)

|November 5, 2008

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Episodic future thought and episodic memory share brain regions, particularly in posterior cortical areas. These regions activate when recalling past or imagining future events in familiar contexts, highlighting a key similarity.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Neuroimaging
Memory Research

Background:

Episodic memory (recalling past events) and episodic future thought (imagining future events) engage overlapping brain networks.
Previous research suggests visual-spatial context plays a role in memory and future thinking.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if episodic future thought relies on memory for visual-spatial contexts, similar to episodic memory.
To test the hypothesis that posterior cortical regions support visual-spatial context retrieval for both past and future events.

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor brain activity.
Participants recalled past and envisioned future personal events in both familiar and unfamiliar contexts.

Main Results:

Posterior cortical regions, including the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), parahippocampal cortex (PHC), and superior occipital gyrus (SOG), showed similar activity for past and future episodic thought in familiar contexts.
These same regions were less active when future events were imagined in unfamiliar contexts.
Activity in PCC, PHC, and SOG correlated with the retrieval of established visual-spatial contexts.

Conclusions:

The findings indicate that posterior cortical regions are crucial for retrieving established visual-spatial contexts during episodic memory and future thought.
This shared mechanism for context retrieval likely underlies the overlapping neural architecture observed between remembering the past and envisioning the future.