Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Am Psychol. 2012 Nov;67(8):603-13. doi: 10.1037/a0029869.
Memory serves critical functions in everyday life but is also prone to error. This article examines adaptive constructive processes, which play a functional role in memory and cognition but can also produce distortions, errors, and illusions. The article describes several types of memory errors that are produced by adaptive constructive processes and focuses in particular on the process of imagining or simulating events that might occur in one's personal future. Simulating future events relies on many of the same cognitive and neural processes as remembering past events, which may help to explain why imagination and memory can be easily confused. The article considers both pitfalls and adaptive aspects of future event simulation in the context of research on planning, prediction, problem solving, mind-wandering, prospective and retrospective memory, coping and positivity bias, and the interconnected set of brain regions known as the default network.
记忆在日常生活中起着至关重要的作用,但也容易出错。本文探讨了适应性构建过程,这些过程在记忆和认知中发挥着功能作用,但也可能产生扭曲、错误和错觉。本文描述了几种由适应性构建过程产生的记忆错误,并特别关注想象或模拟个人未来可能发生的事件的过程。模拟未来事件依赖于许多与记忆过去事件相同的认知和神经过程,这可以帮助解释为什么想象和记忆很容易混淆。本文考虑了在规划、预测、解决问题、思维漫游、前瞻性和回溯性记忆、应对和积极性偏见以及被称为默认网络的一组相互关联的大脑区域的研究背景下,未来事件模拟的陷阱和适应性方面。