Time Regained: How the Human Brain Constructs Memory for Time

AbstractLife’s episodes unfold against a context that changes with time. Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed significant findings about how specific areas of the human brain may support the representation of temporal information in memory. A consistent theme in these studies is that the hippocampus appears to play a central role in representing temporal context, as operationalized in neuroimaging studies of arbitrary lists of items, sequences of items, or meaningful, lifelike events. Additionally, activity in a posterior medial cortical network may reflect the representation of generalized temporal information for meaningful events. The hippocampus, posterior medial network, and other regions—particularly in prefrontal cortex—appear to play complementary roles in memory for temporal context.HighlightsThe hippocampus encodes information about temporal contiguity, order, and event structure.Posterior medial cortical areas represent order across meaningfully coherent events.Prefrontal and subcortical contributions to temporal memory deserve further study.