ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Imagination as a fundamental function of the hippocampus.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- Decoding Medial Entorhinal Cortical Dynamics Produces Planning-Like Alternations in Hippocampal theta Sequences.Hippocampus · 2026Article
- Cognitive maps as a medium for thought.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Naturalistic behavior and self-generated neural activity predictive of self-correction.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Multisensory coding of audiovisual movies in the human hippocampus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- The Map's Design: Evolution's Impact on Navigation and Spatial Cognition.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- Mouse Hippocampal Sharp-Wave Ripple Dataset Curated From Public Neuropixels Datasets.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Short-term memory by distributed neural network oscillators in a simple nervous system.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Modelling of What-Where-When Everyday Memories in Rats.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Disruption of theta-timescale spiking impairs learning but spares hippocampal replay.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Traces of phylogeny and ecology in hippocampal neuron numbers.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- The Criticality of Consciousness: Excitatory-Inhibitory Balance and Dual Memory Systems in Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- New information triggers prospective codes to adapt for flexible navigation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Dynamic gamma modulation of hippocampal place cells predominates development of theta sequences.eLife · 2025Article
- Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Article
- Neural mechanisms of relational learning and fast knowledge reassembly in plastic neural networks.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Addressing Inconsistency in Functional Neuroimaging: A Replicable Data-Driven Multi-Scale Functional Atlas for Canonical Brain Networks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The recursive grammar of mental time travel.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Closed-loop modulation of remote hippocampal representations with neurofeedback.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Imagination is a biological function that is vital to human experience and advanced cognition. Despite this importance, it remains unknown how imagination is realized in the brain. Substantial research focusing on the hippocampus, a brain structure traditionally linked to memory, indicates that firing patterns in spatially tuned neurons can represent previous and upcoming paths in space. This work has generally been interpreted under standard views that the hippocampus implements cognitive abilities primarily related to actual experience, whether in the past (e.g. recollection, consolidation), present (e.g. spatial mapping) or future (e.g. planning). However, relatively recent findings in rodents identify robust patterns of hippocampal firing corresponding to a variety of alternatives to actual experience, in many cases without overt reference to the past, present or future. Given these findings, and others on hippocampal contributions to human imagination, we suggest that a fundamental function of the hippocampus is to generate a wealth of hypothetical experiences and thoughts. Under this view, traditional accounts of hippocampal function in episodic memory and spatial navigation can be understood as particular applications of a more general system for imagination. This view also suggests that the hippocampus contributes to a wider range of cognitive abilities than previously thought. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.