A successful chess player uses knowledge of past strategies and games to anticipate their opponent’s moves, adapting their play on the basis of the specific board configuration and planning several moves ahead. Context-specific past experiences provide important insights for making predictions about future events. In Nature Communications, Tarder-Stoll et al. describe how they explored, using immersive virtual reality and functional MRI, the way in which the brain represents context-specific temporal structure. Participants navigated through 16 naturalistic environments in a VR setting and were asked to create stories to remember the environment sequences, which varied in content and order. A day later, they were shown an image of one environment and were asked to anticipate upcoming environments in the sequence, several steps into the future, while undergoing fMRI scanning. The authors used multivoxel pattern similarity analysis to determine which environments were represented during anticipation. The study shows simultaneous representations of future and past environments, which were more temporally extensive in the hippocampus than in early visual cortex and were context-specific. Participants were also quicker at anticipating future events when hippocampal representations of distant environments were suppressed. These findings align with many theories of predictive processing in the medial temporal lobe.

Original reference: Nat. Commun. 15, 9094 (2024)