Imagination as a dialogue

Abstract

Neuroscience The hippocampus constructs scene imagery to facilitate recollected or imagined mental representations. However, input from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is also needed for scene construction. How do these regions interact when we imagine a scene? Barry et al. addressed this question using magnetoencephalography. Participants imagined novel scenes or single objects after being given a cue. The direction of information flow during scene imagination mirrored that observed during episodic memory retrieval, in which vmPFC drives hippocampal activity. These results indicate that the vmPFC selects the elements for a scene, whereas the hippocampus is necessary to construct the scene imagery. The vmPFC strongly modulates the construction of spatially coherent, contextually appropriate scene imagery. Episodic memory and imagination thus use similar regional dialogue in the brain. J. Neurosci. 39 , 4375 (2019).