Underwood Adam G, Guynn Melissa J, Cohen Anna-Lisa
Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University Las Cruces, NM, USA.
Department of Psychology, Yeshiva University New York, NY, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2015 Dec 24;9:668. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00668. eCollection 2015.
Klein made the provocative suggestion that the purpose of human episodic memory is to enable individuals to plan and prepare for the future. In other words, although episodic (retrospective) memory is about the past, it is not actually for the past; it is for the future. Within this focus, a natural subject for investigation is prospective memory, or memory to do things in the future. An important theoretical construct in the fields of both retrospective memory and prospective memory is that of a retrieval mode, or a neurocognitive set or readiness to treat environmental stimuli as potential retrieval cues. This construct was originally introduced in a theory of episodic (retrospective) memory and has more recently been invoked in a theory of how some prospective memory tasks are accomplished. To our knowledge, this construct has not been explicitly compared between the two literatures, and thus this is the purpose of the present article. Although we address the behavioral evidence for each construct, our primary goal is to assess the extent to which each retrieval mode appears to rely on a common neural region. Our review highlights the fact that a particular area of prefrontal cortex (BA 10) appears to play an important role in both retrospective and prospective retrieval modes. We suggest, based on this evidence and these ideas, that prospective memory research could profit from more active exploration of the relevance of theoretical constructs from the retrospective memory literature.
克莱因提出了一个颇具争议的观点，即人类情景记忆的目的是使个体能够为未来进行规划和准备。换句话说，尽管情景（回顾性）记忆是关于过去的，但它实际上并非为了过去；而是为了未来。基于这一关注点，一个自然的研究主题是前瞻记忆，即对未来要做之事的记忆。回顾性记忆和前瞻记忆领域的一个重要理论概念是提取模式，即一种将环境刺激视为潜在提取线索的神经认知定势或准备状态。这一概念最初是在情景（回顾性）记忆理论中提出的，最近又被应用于关于一些前瞻记忆任务如何完成的理论中。据我们所知，这一概念在这两类文献中尚未得到明确比较，因此这就是本文的目的。尽管我们探讨了每种概念的行为证据，但我们的主要目标是评估每种提取模式在多大程度上似乎依赖于一个共同的神经区域。我们的综述强调了这样一个事实，即前额叶皮质的一个特定区域（BA 10）似乎在回顾性和前瞻性提取模式中都发挥着重要作用。基于这些证据和观点，我们认为前瞻记忆研究可以从更积极地探索回顾性记忆文献中的理论概念的相关性中获益。
