Mullally Sinéad L, Maguire Eleanor A
Institute of Neuroscience, Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom.
Hippocampus. 2014 Nov;24(11):1261-6. doi: 10.1002/hipo.22323. Epub 2014 Jul 11.
We often engage in counterfactual (CF) thinking, which involves reflecting on "what might have been." Creating alternative versions of reality seems to have parallels with recollecting the past and imagining the future in requiring the simulation of internally generated models of complex events. Given that episodic memory and imagining the future are impaired in patients with hippocampal damage and amnesia, we wondered whether successful CF thinking also depends upon the integrity of the hippocampus. Here using two nonepisodic CF thinking tasks, we found that patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and amnesia performed comparably with matched controls. They could deconstruct reality, add in and recombine elements, change relations between temporal sequences of events, enabling them to determine plausible alternatives of complex episodes. A difference between the patients and control participants was evident, however, in the patients' subtle avoidance of CF simulations that required the construction of an internal spatial representation. Overall, our findings suggest that mental simulation in the form of nonepisodic CF thinking does not seem to depend upon the hippocampus unless there is the added requirement for construction of a coherent spatial scene within which to play out scenarios.
我们经常进行反事实（CF）思维，即思考“本可能发生什么”。创造现实的替代版本似乎与回忆过去和想象未来有相似之处，因为它们都需要模拟复杂事件的内部生成模型。鉴于海马体损伤和失忆症患者的情景记忆和想象未来的能力受损，我们想知道成功的CF思维是否也依赖于海马体的完整性。在这里，我们使用两项非情景CF思维任务，发现双侧海马体损伤和失忆症患者的表现与匹配的对照组相当。他们能够解构现实，添加并重新组合元素，改变事件时间序列之间的关系，从而能够确定复杂情节的合理替代方案。然而，患者与对照参与者之间存在明显差异，即患者会微妙地避免需要构建内部空间表征的CF模拟。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，非情景CF思维形式的心理模拟似乎不依赖于海马体，除非还需要构建一个连贯的空间场景来展现情景。
