The second phase of BE occurs at retrieval, where the extrapolation beyond the original scene borders that occurred in the first phase is revealed by a subsequent memory error. Specifically, if presented with exactly the same scene Selleck BYL719 a second time, people frequently judge the scene on this occasion to have less background, making it appear to be closer-up than the first scene. The fact that the studied view need only be absent for

as little as 42 msec for BE to be apparent (Intraub and Dickinson, 2008) underscores the online and spontaneous nature of this effect. The first stage of BE, involving the active extrapolation of the scene beyond the boundaries, we hereafter refer to as the BE effect to differentiate it from the subsequent memory error, which we call the BE error. The BE effect captures something automatic and fundamental about our interaction with the world yet its neural substrates have not been well-characterised. The only neuropsychological study of BE was conducted recently by Mullally et al. (2012), who examined BE in patients with selective bilateral hippocampal damage and concomitant amnesia. Notably, these patients were also impaired at constructing fictitious and future scenes and events in the imagination (see also Hassabis et al., 2007; Rosenbaum

et al., 2009; http://www.selleckchem.com/products/SGI-1776.html Andelman et al., 2010; Race et al., 2011). The extrapolation of scenes beyond the view depends on intact scene construction ability (Hassabis and Maguire, 2007, 2009), PIK3C2G suggesting that BE should be reduced in such patients. This is indeed what Mullally et al. (2012) found, with BE significantly attenuated compared to matched control participants across a variety of BE paradigms leading to the conclusion that the hippocampus (HC) supports the internal construction of scenes and also extended scenes when they are

not physically in view. Only one functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study has examined the neural correlates of BE, using a region-of-interest (ROI) approach focused on two scene-relevant brain areas, the posterior parahippocampal cortex (PHC) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC) (Park et al., 2007). The aim of their study was not to investigate activity relating to the initial extension of a scene during the first presentation (the BE effect), but instead was to examine neural adaptation (i.e., attenuation in the neural response with repeated presentation of a stimulus – see Grill-Spector et al., 2006) on presentation of the second scene. They found that both PHC and RSC demonstrated adaptation effects consistent with the subjective perception of scenes rather than the physical reality. The results of this study suggest that these scene-relevant regions are sensitive to the output of BE at the BE error stage. The findings from Park et al.