Research Focus

Humans have an amazing capacity to mentally traverse time and space: we can remember ourselves in the past and imagine ourselves in the future. My research program combines neuroimaging, behavioural and neuropsychological methods to investigate how the human brain enables us to remember past experiences, imagine future events and construct a coherent sense of self. In particular, I have focused on the qualities of memories and imagined events, the types of details that comprise these mental representations and the processes that underlie their (re)construction. I have also examined how these abilities change in healthy aging, psychiatric disorders, such as depression, as well as in the context of brain damage in dementia and epilepsy. My research in this area led to the development of our Constructive Episodic Simulation Hypothesis, a theory that describes the overlapping cognitive processes involved in memory and imagination. Moreover, my work has elucidated the role of specific brain regions (e.g., the hippocampus) and whole-brain networks in memory and imagination, as well as other forms of creative cognition.

Select Publications

• Roberts RP, Schacter DL, Addis DR. (2018). Scene construction and relational processing: Separable constructs?. Cerebral Cortex, 28, 1729-1732.
• Tippett LJ, Prebble S, Addis DR. (2018). The Persistence of the Self over Time in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Alzheimer’s Disease. Frontiers in Psychology, 9 , 94.
• Devitt AL, Addis DR, Schacter DL. (2017). Episodic and semantic content of memory and imagination: A multilevel analysis . Memory and Cognition, 45, 1078-1094.
• Roberts RP, Wiebels K, Sumner RL, van Mulukom V, Grady CL, Schacter DL, Addis DR. (2017). An fMRI investigation of the relationship between future imagination and cognitive flexibility. Neuropsychologia, 95, 156-172.

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