Temporal Dissociation of Neocortical and Hippocampal Contributions to Mental Time Travel Using Intracranial Recordings in Humans.

Roey Schurr,Shahar Arzy,Mor Nitzan,Laurent Spinelli,Ruth Eliahou,Margitta Seeck,Olaf Blanke

doi:10.3389/fncom.2018.00011

Roey Schurr, Shahar Arzy + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2018.00011

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In mental time travel (MTT) one is “traveling” back-and-forth in time, remembering, and imagining events. Despite intensive research regarding memory processes in the hippocampus, it was only recently shown that the hippocampus plays an essential role in encoding the temporal order of events remembered, and therefore plays an important role in MTT. Does it also encode the temporal relations of these events to the remembering self? We asked patients undergoing pre-surgical evaluation with depth electrodes penetrating the temporal lobes bilaterally toward the hippocampus to project themselves in time to a past, future, or present time-point, and then make judgments regarding various events. Classification analysis of intracranial evoked potentials revealed clear temporal dissociation in the left hemisphere between lateral-temporal electrodes, activated at ~100–300 ms, and hippocampal electrodes, activated at ~400–600 ms. This dissociation may suggest a division of labor in the temporal lobe during self-projection in time, hinting toward the different roles of the lateral-temporal cortex and the hippocampus in MTT and the temporal organization of the related events with respect to the experiencing self.

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A fundamental trait of human cognition is the capacity to engage in “mental time travel” (MTT), to remember past events or imagine possible future ones (Tulving, 1985)
The present study used the high temporal and spatial resolution of intracranial recordings and employed a classification analysis in order to distinguish between lateral temporal cortex (LTC) and hippocampal involvement in self-projection in time, a key component in MTT
Our intracranial evoked potentials (iEPs) data revealed that LTC and hippocampal contributions to self-projection in time display distinct temporal dynamics

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A fundamental trait of human cognition is the capacity to engage in “mental time travel” (MTT), to remember past events or imagine possible future ones (Tulving, 1985). The Temporal Cortex in MTT elements from memory and their subsequent binding into a coherent spatial scene (Hassabis et al, 2007a; Maguire and Mullally, 2013) Another process suggested as a fundamental aspect of MTT is self-projection in time, namely the ability to disengage from the immediate environment and mentally “project” oneself to a new “self-location” in time, either in the past or in the future (Buckner and Carroll, 2007; Arzy et al, 2008; Nyberg et al, 2010; Markowitsch and Staniloiu, 2011; Klein, 2013; Kurczek et al, 2015). MTT comprises of several distinct processes, among them: selfprojection to a specific self-location in time, imagination of the relevant event (that is, the act of remembering a past event or of prospecting a future one), and self-orientation with respect to other events (Peer et al, 2014, 2015)

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