Published in:Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1093/scan/nsaa163
ISSN:
1749-5016;
1749-5024
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>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.</jats:p>