The prefrontal patients were included as a

control group, specifically selected on the basis of their lesions not affecting the vmPFC or other areas known to be involved in autobiographical memory. The authors suggested that the selective impairment in future thinking after lesions to the ventrolateral and dorsal PFC may be attributed to the involvement of these areas in accessing and selecting elements from long-term memory for working memory manipulation. Similarly, de Vito et al. (2012) reported that patients with Parkinson disease showed impairment relative to controls on the amount of episodic details generated for future events, but not for remembered or fictitious events. These patients presented problems on Selleckchem RAD001 executive control, while having no difficulties on traditional memory tasks. In both of these studies, problems were limited to future events. This is not the case in our own study; however, our patients presented more severe executive dysfunction, which might explain why both memory and future thinking were affected. In addition to executive dysfunction, goals and motivations held by the self are thought to influence the construction of memories and future thoughts (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Thus, the common behavioural changes, such as diminished motivation, apathy and distractibility that occur after TBI, may have contributed to impaired episodic memory and future thinking (Piolino et al.,

2007). It is also possible that deficits in hippocampal functioning in the TBI patients played a role. There is selleck screening library indeed evidence that the hippocampus plays a critical role in scene construction (Hassabis et al., 2007) and hippocampal atrophy is a well-documented consequence of TBI (Ariza et al., 2006; Hopkins, Tate, & Bigler, 2005; Tate & Bigler, 2000; Tomaiuolo et al., 2004). In the present study, the TBI patients’ scores on the relational else memory task (VPA from

WMS) were within the normal range. Nonetheless, there were big differences within the group, with two patients scoring two standard deviations below the norm. Individual variability on the relative contribution of executive versus relational memory deficits to the TBI patients’ impaired episodic future thinking is therefore likely. Finally, another possible interpretation of the present finding is that some of the reported group differences in performances are due to different narrative styles. Recent findings have indicated that deficits in narrative construction may underline future thinking impairments in older adults (Gaesser, Sacchetti, Addis, & Schacter, 2011). This raises the possibility that TBI patients pose a more general inability to integrate information in working memory during narrative construction, regardless of the actual quality of the representations themselves. In the present study, the TBI patients tended to produce fewer details overall, although this difference was not significant.