title: The Role of Perspective in Mental Time Travel.
abstract: Recent years have seen accumulating evidence for the proposition that people process time by mapping it onto a linear spatial representation and automatically "project" themselves on an imagined mental time line. Here, we ask whether people can adopt the temporal perspective of another person when travelling through time. To elucidate similarities and differences between time travelling from one's own perspective or from the perspective of another person, we asked participants to mentally project themselves or someone else (i.e., a coexperimenter) to different time points. Three basic properties of mental time travel were manipulated: temporal location (i.e., where in time the travel originates: past, present, and future), motion direction (either backwards or forwards), and temporal duration (i.e., the distance to travel: one, three, or five years). We found that time travels originating in the present lasted longer in the self- than in the other-perspective. Moreover, for self-perspective, but not for other-perspective, time was differently scaled depending on where in time the travel originated. In contrast, when considering the direction and the duration of time travelling, no dissimilarities between the self- and the other-perspective emerged. These results suggest that self- and other-projection, despite some differences, share important similarities in structure.
authors.affiliation: Department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16163 Genoa, Italy.
authors.forename: Caterina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ansuini
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Torino, 10123 Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cavallo
authors.affiliation: SpAtial, Motor & Bodily Awareness (SAMBA) Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Torino, 10123 Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Lorenzo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Pia
authors.affiliation: Department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16163 Genoa, Italy; Department of Psychology, University of Torino, 10123 Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Becchio
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D013997:Time Factors; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult