The internal orienting hypothesis predicts that the internal/external manipulation should not affect DMN involvement during retrieval because retrieval is always internally-oriented. In other words, we expected increased DMN activity to be associated with successful retrieval regardless of internal or external memory orientation. As shown in Table 4 and Figure 2, results generally confirmed this prediction. Except for superior PFC, all DMN regions including HF showed a significant main effect of memory, and no memory×orientation interaction. The internal orienting hypothesis also predicts that successful encoding should be associated with reduced DMN activity only when the information to be encoded is external (Ext-Enc), and hence disrupted by an internal orientation, but not when this information is internal. In other words, this account predicted a memory (successful, unsuccessful)×orientation (internal, external) interaction during encoding. As shown in Figure 2 and Tables 3 and 4, none of the DMN regions showed a significant interaction. Thus, overall, our findings do not support the internal orienting hypothesis. As illustrated in Tables 3 and 4, whereas our retrieval findings are in agreement with the internal orienting hypothesis, our encoding findings clearly are not.
