Journal
SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 16, Issue 3, Pages 315-325Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsaa163
Keywords
mental time travel; self-projection; episodic memory; future thinking; vmPFC
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Funding
- PRIN grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research [20174TPEFJ]
- Italian Ministry of Health [PE-2016-02362477]
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Evidence suggests that patients with vmPFC damage have difficulty projecting themselves into the future and recognizing future events, indicating a significant and multifaceted role of vmPFC in future-oriented mental time travel.
The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in mental time travel toward the past and the future is debated. Here, patients with focal lesions to the vmPFC and brain-damaged and healthy controls mentally projected themselves to a past, present or future moment of subjective time (self-projection) and classified a series of events as past or future relative to the adopted temporal self-location (self-reference). We found that vmPFC patients were selectively impaired in projecting themselves to the future and in recognizing relative-future events. These findings indicate that vmPFC damage hinders the mental processing of and movement toward future events, pointing to a prominent, multifaceted role of vmPFC in future-oriented mental time travel.
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