Gauthier Baptiste, van Wassenhove Virginie
Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA DRF/I2BM, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France.
Cognition. 2016 Sep;154:55-68. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.05.015. Epub 2016 May 27.
The ability to imagine ourselves in the past, in the future or in different spatial locations suggests that the brain can generate cognitive maps that are independent of the experiential self in the here and now. Using three experiments, we asked to which extent Mental Time Travel (MTT; imagining the self in time) and Mental Space Navigation (MSN; imagining the self in space) shared similar cognitive operations. For this, participants judged the ordinality of real historical events in time and in space with respect to different mental perspectives: for instance, participants mentally projected themselves in Paris in nine years, and judged whether an event occurred before or after, or, east or west, of where they mentally stood. In all three experiments, symbolic distance effects in time and space dimensions were quantified using Reaction Times (RT) and Error Rates (ER). When self-projected, participants were slower and were less accurate (absolute distance effects); participants were also faster and more accurate when the spatial and temporal distances were further away from their mental viewpoint (relative distance effects). These effects show that MTT and MSN require egocentric mapping and that self-projection requires map transformations. Additionally, participants' performance was affected when self-projection was made in one dimension but judgements in another, revealing a competition between temporal and spatial mapping (Experiment 2 & 3). Altogether, our findings suggest that MTT and MSN are separately mapped although they require comparable allo- to ego-centric map conversion.
能够想象自己处于过去、未来或不同的空间位置,这表明大脑可以生成独立于此时此地体验自我的认知地图。我们通过三个实验,探究心理时间旅行(MTT;在时间中想象自我)和心理空间导航(MSN;在空间中想象自我)在多大程度上共享相似的认知操作。为此,参与者从不同心理视角判断真实历史事件在时间和空间上的顺序:例如,参与者在脑海中设想自己九年后身处巴黎,并判断一个事件是发生在他们脑海中所处位置的之前还是之后,或者东边还是西边。在所有三个实验中,使用反应时间(RT)和错误率(ER)对时间和空间维度上的符号距离效应进行量化。当进行自我投射时,参与者反应更慢且准确性更低(绝对距离效应);当空间和时间距离离他们的心理视角更远时,参与者反应更快且更准确(相对距离效应)。这些效应表明,心理时间旅行和心理空间导航需要以自我为中心的映射,且自我投射需要地图转换。此外,当在一个维度上进行自我投射而在另一个维度上进行判断时,参与者的表现会受到影响,这揭示了时间和空间映射之间的竞争(实验2和3)。总之,我们的研究结果表明,心理时间旅行和心理空间导航虽然需要类似的从异我中心到自我中心的地图转换,但它们是分别进行映射的。