Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 36, Issue 47, Pages 11891-11903Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1400-16.2016
Keywords
egocentric map; fMRI; self; spatial navigation; time
Categories
Funding
- European Research Council [YStG-263584]
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche [10JCJC-1904]
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Humans can consciously project themselves in the future and imagine themselves at different places. Do mental time travel and mental space navigation abilities share common cognitive and neural mechanisms? To test this, we recorded fMRI while participants mentally projected themselves in time or in space (e.g., 9 years ago, in Paris) and ordered historical events from their mental perspective. Behavioral patterns were comparable for mental time and space and shaped by self-projection and by the distance of historical events to the mental position of the self, suggesting the existence of egocentric mapping in both dimensions. Nonetheless, self-projection in space engaged the medial and lateral parietal cortices, whereas self-projection in time engaged a widespread parietofrontal network. Moreover, while a large distributed network was found for spatial distances, temporal distances specifically engaged the right inferior parietal cortex and the anterior insula. Across these networks, a robust overlap was only found in a small region of the inferior parietal lobe, adding evidence for its role in domain-general egocentric mapping. Our findings suggest that mental travel in time or space capitalizes on egocentric remapping and on distance computation, which are implemented in distinct dimension-specific cortical networks converging in inferior parietal lobe.
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