Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
J Neuropsychol. 2018 Mar;12(1):78-100. doi: 10.1111/jnp.12108. Epub 2016 Jun 23.
Neuroimaging studies suggest that remembering the past and imagining the future engage a common brain network including several areas of the prefrontal cortex. Although patients with prefrontal damage often are described as blind to the future consequences of their decisions, and inclined to 'live in the here and now', little is known as to how the prefrontal cortex mediates past and future mental time travel.
Nine patients with prefrontal lesions and nine healthy controls generated past and future events in response to different time periods. Event transcriptions were scored using the Autobiographical Interview protocol (Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, & Moscovitch, 2002), which provides a reliable system for categorizing internal (episodic) and external (semantic) information. For each event, participants answered a series of questions to assess self-reported phenomenal characteristics.
Patients with prefrontal lesions exhibited deficits in both remembering past events and imagining future events by generating fewer internal details than controls. This effect of group was larger in the past condition than in the future condition. In contrast, no group differences were seen in the number of external details, which were at the same level for patients and controls for both temporal conditions. There were no group differences in ratings of phenomenal characteristics.
Our findings suggest that damage to prefrontal structures adversely affects the retrieval of past and the construction of future events. In particular, prefrontal structures are critical for the production of episodic event-specific details when engaging in past and future mental time travel.
神经影像学研究表明，回忆过去和想象未来涉及一个共同的大脑网络，包括前额叶皮层的几个区域。尽管前额叶损伤的患者通常被描述为对其决策的未来后果视而不见，并且倾向于“活在当下”，但对于前额叶皮层如何介导过去和未来的心理时间旅行知之甚少。
9 名前额叶损伤患者和 9 名健康对照者根据不同的时间段生成过去和未来的事件。事件转录物使用自传体访谈协议（Levine、Svoboda、Hay、Winocur 和 Moscovitch，2002 年）进行评分，该协议提供了一种可靠的系统，用于对内部（情节）和外部（语义）信息进行分类。对于每个事件，参与者回答了一系列问题，以评估自我报告的现象特征。
前额叶损伤患者在回忆过去事件和想象未来事件方面都存在缺陷，与对照组相比，他们生成的内部细节较少。这种组间效应在过去条件下大于未来条件。相比之下，在外部细节数量方面没有组间差异，对于两个时间条件，患者和对照组的外部细节数量相同。在现象特征的评分方面也没有组间差异。
我们的研究结果表明，前额叶结构损伤会对过去事件的检索和未来事件的构建产生不利影响。特别是，前额叶结构对于在过去和未来的心理时间旅行中产生情节事件特定细节至关重要。
