title: Age-Related Effects on Future Mental Time Travel.
abstract: Mental time travel (MTT), the ability to travel mentally back and forward in time in order to reexperience past events and preexperience future events, is crucial in human cognition. As we move along life, MTT may be changed accordingly. However, the relation between re- and preexperiencing along the lifespan is still not clear. Here, young and older adults underwent a psychophysical paradigm assessing two different components of MTT: self-projection, which is the ability to project the self towards a past or a future location of the mental time line, and self-reference, which is the ability to determine whether events are located in the past or future in reference to that given self-location. Aged individuals performed worse in both self-projection to the future and self-reference to future events compared to young individuals. In addition, aging decreased older adults' preference for personal compared to nonpersonal events. These results demonstrate the impact of MTT and self-processing on subjective time processing in healthy aging. Changes in memory functions in aged people may therefore be related not only to memory per se, but also to the relations of memory and self.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy; Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri Hospital IRCCS, 46042 Castel Goffredo, Italy.
authors.forename: Filomena
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Anelli
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy; Centro Studi e Ricerche in Neuroscienze Cognitive, 47023 Cesena, Italy.
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ciaramelli
authors.affiliation: Neuropsychiatry Lab, Faculty of Medicine, Hadassah Hebrew University Medical School, 91200 Jerusalem, Israel; Department of Neurology, Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center, 91200 Jerusalem, Israel.
authors.forename: Shahar
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Arzy
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy; Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri Hospital IRCCS, 46042 Castel Goffredo, Italy.
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Frassinetti
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D055815:Young Adult