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Updated: Jan 28, 2026

Practical Methodology of Cognitive Tasks Within a Navigational Assessment
Published on: June 1, 2015
Identifying the cognitive processes underpinning hippocampal-dependent tasks
Ian A Clark1, Victoria Hotchin1, Anna Monk1
1Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging.
Abstract:
Autobiographical memory, future thinking, and spatial navigation are critical cognitive functions that are thought to be related and are known to depend upon a brain structure called the hippocampus. Surprisingly, direct evidence for their interrelatedness is lacking, as is an understanding of why they might be related. There is debate about whether they are linked by an underlying memory-related process or, as has more recently been suggested, because they each require the endogenous construction of scene imagery. Here, using a large sample of participants and multiple cognitive tests with a wide spread of individual differences in performance, we found that these functions are indeed related. Mediation analyses further showed that scene construction, and not memory, mediated (explained) the relationships between the functions. These findings offer a fresh perspective on autobiographical memory, future thinking, navigation, and also on the hippocampus, where scene imagery appears to play an influential role. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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