The internal orienting hypothesis states that focusing attention internally would be detrimental to encoding when study items are externally-presented (Ext-Enc), but it would be beneficial when these events are internally-generated (Inc-Enc). In other words, this account predicts that decreased activity in the DMN regions should be associated with successful Ext-Enc, but increased activity with successful Int-Enc. As evaluation of our internal/external manipulation, we compared activity in the DMN regions regardless of memory. In line with previous results [30], we found that the DMN regions generally showed more activity during Int-Enc than Ext-Enc conditions. Yet, counter to the internal orienting account, we found that, except for HF, the DMN regions generally showed decreased activity during successful encoding regardless of internal/external orientation. This finding argues against the idea that the DMN regions underlie an internal attention system.
