A Limited Cost-Benefit Analysis of Virtual Interview Training for Transition-Age Youth With Disabilities in Pre-Employment Transition Services.

Memory has been a part of the conversation about the resting brain since the very beginning. Before it was coined the “default mode” (), Nancy Andreasen and colleagues referred to this state as “random episodic silent thinking” (), highlighting the central role of memory processes in the brain at rest. In their view, this state was “both active and interesting,” characterized by spontaneous remembering and free association. Thirty years later, it is well known that the default mode network (DMN) is strongly and reliably active during episodic memory tasks, and in particular, when individuals recall or imagine specific contextual details about an event (; ; ). While a major theme of past work has been to ask what the DMN contributes to episodic memory, it may also be productive to consider what episodic memory can offer for understanding the DMN. Episodic memories showcase the complexity of our internal representations: they bind together details about people, places, and things into a coherent narrative. As experimenters, we have inside knowledge about their contents and structure. Moreover, they have a phenomenological quality that sets them apart from other mental representations. Together, these features make episodic memory an appealing domain in which to study the richness of internal representations afforded by the DMN. In this review, I will discuss recent findings relevant for examining the DMN through the lens of episodic memory. In doing so, I will attempt to identify organizing principles that systematically link DMN responses to memory representations, i.e., the content of what is remembered ().