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  4. The mental time line: an analogue of the mental number line in the mapping of life events
 
research article

The mental time line: an analogue of the mental number line in the mapping of life events

Arzy, Shahar
•
Adi-Japha, Esther
•
Blanke, Olaf  
2009
Consciousness and cognition

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this "self-projection" in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined "location" on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.concog.2009.05.007
Web of Science ID

WOS:000270376100022

Author(s)
Arzy, Shahar
Adi-Japha, Esther
Blanke, Olaf  
Date Issued

2009

Publisher

Elsevier

Published in
Consciousness and cognition
Volume

18

Issue

3

Start page

781

End page

5

Subjects

Imagination

•

Life Change Events

•

Mental Recall

•

Time Perception

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LNCO  
Available on Infoscience
November 12, 2010
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/57443
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