School distress and the school attendance crisis: a story dominated by neurodivergence and unmet need.

Background: The Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus a school attendance crisis in many countries, although this likely pre-dates the pandemic. Children and young people (CYP) struggling to attend school often display extreme emotional distress before/during/after school. We term this School Distress.

Characterizing memory loss in patients with autoimmune limbic encephalitis hippocampal lesions.

Since the publication of Scoville and Milner's (1957) seminal paper, the precise functional role played by the hippocampus in support of human memory has been fiercely debated. For instance, the single question of whether the hippocampus plays a time-limited or an indelible role in the recollection of personal memories led to a deep and tenacious schism within the field. Similar polarizations arose between those who debated the precise nature of the role played by the hippocampus in support of semantic relative to episodic memories and in recall/recollection relative to familiarity-based recognition.

Boundary extension is attenuated in patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and hippocampus have been implicated in the mental construction of scenes and events. However, little is known about their specific contributions to these cognitive functions. Boundary extension (BE) is a robust indicator of fast, automatic, and implicit scene construction.

Scenes, Spaces, and Memory Traces: What Does the Hippocampus Do?

The hippocampus is one of the most closely scrutinized brain structures in neuroscience. While traditionally associated with memory and spatial cognition, in more recent years it has also been linked with other functions, including aspects of perception and imagining fictitious and future scenes. Efforts continue apace to understand how the hippocampus plays such an apparently wide-ranging role.

Constructing, Perceiving, and Maintaining Scenes: Hippocampal Activity and Connectivity.

In recent years, evidence has accumulated to suggest the hippocampus plays a role beyond memory. A strong hippocampal response to scenes has been noted, and patients with bilateral hippocampal damage cannot vividly recall scenes from their past or construct scenes in their imagination. There is debate about whether the hippocampus is involved in the online processing of scenes independent of memory.

Counterfactual thinking in patients with amnesia.

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.

Learning to remember: the early ontogeny of episodic memory.

Over the past 60 years the neural correlates of human episodic memory have been the focus of intense neuroscientific scrutiny. By contrast, neuroscience has paid substantially less attention to understanding the emergence of this neurocognitive system. In this review we consider how the study of memory development has evolved.

Scene construction in developmental amnesia: an fMRI study.

Amnesic patients with bilateral hippocampal damage sustained in adulthood are generally unable to construct scenes in their imagination. By contrast, patients with developmental amnesia (DA), where hippocampal damage was acquired early in life, have preserved performance on this task, although the reason for this sparing is unclear. One possibility is that residual function in remnant hippocampal tissue is sufficient to support basic scene construction in DA.

The hippocampus: a manifesto for change.

We currently lack a unified and mechanistic account of how the hippocampus supports a range of disparate cognitive functions that includes episodic memory, imagining the future, and spatial navigation. Here, we argue that in order to leverage this long-standing issue, traditional notions regarding the architecture of memory should be eschewed. Instead, we invoke the idea that scenes are central to hippocampal information processing.

Memory, Imagination, and Predicting the Future: A Common Brain Mechanism?

On the face of it, memory, imagination, and prediction seem to be distinct cognitive functions. However, metacognitive, cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging evidence is emerging that they are not, suggesting intimate links in their underlying processes. Here, we explore these empirical findings and the evolving theoretical frameworks that seek to explain how a common neural system supports our recollection of times past, imagination, and our attempts to predict the future.

Exploring the role of space-defining objects in constructing and maintaining imagined scenes.

It has recently been observed that certain objects, when viewed or imagined in isolation, evoke a strong sense of three-dimensional local space surrounding them (space-defining (SD) objects), while others do not (space-ambiguous (SA) objects), and this is associated with engagement of the parahippocampal cortex (PHC). But activation of the PHC is classically associated with scene stimuli. The comparable neural response within PHC to both full scenes and single SD objects, led us to hypothesise that SD objects might play a more critical role in the construction and maintenance of scene representations than SA objects.

Suppressing the encoding of new information in memory: a behavioral study derived from principles of hippocampal function.

Cognitive processes do not occur in isolation. Interactions between cognitive processes can be observed as a cost in performance following a switch between tasks, a cost that is greatest when the cognitive requirements of the sequential tasks compete. Interestingly, the long-term mnemonic goals associated with specific cognitive tasks can also directly compete.

The hippocampus extrapolates beyond the view in scenes: an fMRI study of boundary extension.

Boundary extension (BE) is a pervasive phenomenon whereby people remember seeing more of a scene than was present in the physical input, because they extrapolate beyond the borders of the original stimulus. This automatic embedding of a scene into a wider context supports our experience of a continuous and coherent world, and is therefore highly adaptive. BE, whilst occurring rapidly, is nevertheless thought to comprise two stages.

Retrosplenial cortex codes for permanent landmarks.

Landmarks are critical components of our internal representation of the environment, yet their specific properties are rarely studied, and little is known about how they are processed in the brain. Here we characterised a large set of landmarks along a range of features that included size, visual salience, navigational utility, and permanence. When human participants viewed images of these single landmarks during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), parahippocampal cortex (PHC) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC) were both engaged by landmark features, but in different ways.

Scene construction in amnesia: an FMRI study.

In recent years, there has been substantial interest in how the human hippocampus not only supports recollection of past experiences, but also the construction of fictitious and future events, and the leverage this might offer for understanding the operating mechanisms of the hippocampus. Evidence that patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and amnesia cannot construct novel or future scenes/events has been influential in driving this line of research forward. There are, however, some patients with hippocampal damage and amnesia who retain the ability to construct novel scenes.

Exploring the parahippocampal cortex response to high and low spatial frequency spaces.

The posterior parahippocampal cortex (PHC) supports a range of cognitive functions, in particular scene processing. However, it has recently been suggested that PHC engagement during functional MRI simply reflects the representation of three-dimensional local space. If so, PHC should respond to space in the absence of scenes, geometric layout, objects or contextual associations.

Attenuated boundary extension produces a paradoxical memory advantage in amnesic patients.

Background: When we view a scene, we construct an internal representation of the scene that extends beyond its given borders. This cognitive phenomenon is revealed by a subsequent memory error when we confidently misremember the extended scene instead of the original. This effect is known as "boundary extension" and is apparent in adults, children, and babies.

A new role for the parahippocampal cortex in representing space.

The debate surrounding the function of the human posterior parahippocampal cortex (PHC) is currently dominated by two competing theories. The spatial layout hypothesis proposes that PHC processes information about the shape of space embodied in layout-defining scene features. The contextual association hypothesis rejects this notion, proposing instead that PHC responds to highly contextualized, but not necessarily spatial, stimuli.

Prolonged rote learning produces delayed memory facilitation and metabolic changes in the hippocampus of the ageing human brain.

Background: Repeated rehearsal is one method by which verbal material may be transferred from short- to long-term memory. We hypothesised that extended engagement of memory structures through prolonged rehearsal would result in enhanced efficacy of recall and also of brain structures implicated in new learning. Twenty-four normal participants aged 55-70 (mean = 60.