Memory is prone to distortions that can have serious consequences in everyday life. Here we integrate emerging evidence that several types of memory distortions – imagination inflation, gist-based and associative memory errors, and post-event misinformation – reflect adaptive cognitive processes that contribute to the efficient functioning of memory, but produce distortions as a consequence of doing so. We consider recent cognitive and neuroimaging studies that link these distortions with adaptive processes, including simulation of future events, semantic and contextual encoding, creativity, and memory updating. We also discuss new evidence concerning factors that can influence the occurrence of memory distortions, such as sleep and retrieval conditions, as well as conceptual issues related to the development of an adaptive perspective.

Baron-Cohen (1995) proposed that the theory of mind (TOM) inference system evolved to promote strategic social interaction. Social exchange-a form of cooperation for mutual benefit-involves strategic social interaction and requires TOM inferences about the contents of other individual's mental states, especially their desires, goals, and intentions. There are behavioral and neuropsychological dissociations between reasoning about social exchange and reasoning about equivalent problems tapping other, more general, content domains. It has therefore been proposed that social exchange behavior is regulated by social contract algorithms: a domain-specific inference system that is functionally specialized for reasoning about social exchange. We report an fMRI study using the Wason selection task that provides further support for this hypothesis. Precautionary rules share so many properties with social exchange rulesthey are conditional, deontic, and involve subjective utilities-that most reasoning theories claim they are processed by the same neurocomputational machinery. Nevertheless, neuroimagingshows that reasoning about social exchange activates brain areas not activated by reasoning about precautionary rules, and vice versa. As predicted, neural correlates of theory of mind (anterior and posterior temporal cortex) were activated when subjects interpreted social exchange rules, but not precautionary rules (where TOM inferences are unnecessary). We argue that the interaction between TOM and social contract algorithms can be reciprocal: social contract algorithms requires TOM inferences, but their functional logic also allows TOM inferences to be made. By considering interactions between TOM in the narrower sense (belief-desire reasoning) and all the social inference systems that create the logic of human social interaction-ones that enable as well as use inferences about the content of mental states-a broader conception of theory of mind may emerge: a computational model embodying a Theory of Human Nature (TOHN). Social exchange reasoning engages TOM 3A fierce debate over the nature of the human mind has raged over the last two decades, and the study of reasoning has been a principal battleground. Broadly construed, reasoning is the ability to generate new representations of the world-new knowledge-from given or observed information. It is often considered constitutive of human intelligence: the most distinctly human cognitive ability, often thought to exist in opposition to, and as a replacement for, instinct.Discovering the nature of the inferential procedures whereby new knowledge is generated is, therefore, a foundational task of the cognitive sciences, with implications for every branch of the social sciences (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).One side of the reasoning debate has defended a long-standing and traditional view of the evolved architecture of the human mind: that it is a blank slate, a neurocomputational system equipped with content-free inferential procedures that operate uniformly on information ...

Environmental context learned without awareness can facilitate visual processing of goal-relevant information. According to one view, the benefit of implicitly learned context relies on the neural systems involved in spatial attention and hippocampus-mediated memory. While this view has received empirical support, it contradicts traditional models of hippocampal function. The purpose of the present work was to clarify the influence of spatial context on visual search performance and on brain structures involved memory and attention. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that activity in the hippocampus as well as in visual and parietal cortex was modulated by learned visual context even though participants’ subjective reports and performance on a post-experiment recognition task indicated no explicit knowledge of the learned context. Moreover, the magnitude of the initial selective hippocampus response predicted the magnitude of the behavioral benefit due to context observed at the end of the experiment. The results suggest that implicit contextual learning is mediated by attention and memory and that these systems interact to support search of our environment.

Imagined spatial transformations of objects (e.g., mental rotation) and the self (e.g., perspective taking) are psychologically dissociable. In mental rotation, the viewer transforms the location or orientation of an object relative to stable egocentric and environmental reference frames. In imagined shifts of perspective, the viewer's egocentric reference frame is transformed with respect to stable objects and environment. Using fMRI, we showed that during mental transformations of objects the right superior parietal cortex exhibited a positive linear relationship between hemodynamic response and degrees of rotation. By contrast, during imagined transformations of the self, the same regions exhibited a negative linear trend. We interpret this finding in terms of the role of parietal cortex in coding the locations of objects in relation to the body.

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People often falsely recognize items that are similar to previously encountered items. This robust memory error is referred to as gist-based false recognition. A widely held view is that this error occurs because the details fade rapidly from our memory. Contrary to this view, an initial experiment revealed that, following the same encoding conditions that produce high rates of gist-based false recognition, participants overwhelmingly chose the correct target rather than its related foil when given the option to do so. A second experiment showed that this result is due to increased access to stored details provided by reinstatement of the originally encoded photograph, rather than to increased attention to the details. Collectively, these results suggest that details needed for accurate recognition are, to a large extent, still stored in memory and that a critical factor determining whether false recognition will occur is whether these details can be accessed during retrieval.

Age-related episodic memory decline is characterized by striking heterogeneity across individuals. Hippocampal pattern completion is a fundamental process supporting episodic memory. Yet, the degree to which this mechanism is impaired with age, and contributes to variability in episodic memory, remains unclear. We combine univariate and multivariate analyses of fMRI data from a large cohort of cognitively normal older adults (N=100) to measure hippocampal activity and cortical reinstatement during retrieval of trial-unique associations. Trial-wise analyses revealed that (a) hippocampal activity scaled with reinstatement strength, (b) cortical reinstatement partially mediated the relationship between hippocampal activity and associative retrieval, (c) older age weakened cortical reinstatement and its relationship to memory behaviour. Moreover, individual differences in the strength of hippocampal activity and cortical reinstatement explained unique variance in performance across multiple assays of episodic memory. These results indicate that fMRI indices of hippocampal pattern completion explain within- and across-individual memory variability in older adults.

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