Ricerc@Sapienza

Autobiographical memory refers to the recollection of specific events from one own's past (episodic autobiographical memory, EAM) and general knowledge about oneself (semantic autobiographical memory, SAM). Whereas SAM is devoid of a specific spatiotemporal context, EAM involves the representation of personal events occurred at a specific time and place, and entails re-experiencing and self-projection in the past (mental time travel). Mental time travel in EAM has been proposed to rely on a mapping of events onto a "mental timeline" (MTL); however, no study has addressed brain correlates of mental travel in EAM along the MTL using real autobiographical events. This study aims to investigate brain correlates of mental time travel in EAM, developing a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm based on the spatiotemporal compatibility effect, for which responses to time-related stimuli are faster when the response direction is compatible with a back-to-front MTL (e.g. forward responses for future-related words; congruent condition), compared to the reverse mapping condition (backward responses for future-related words; incongruent condition). During fMRI, participants will be asked to respond to events (EAMs) and facts (SAMs) from their own life, collected using a memory fluency task. As only EAMs are organized according to a temporal context, the interaction effect between the factors "Category" (EAM vs. SAM) and "Condition" (compatible vs. non-compatible with the MTL) will allow to highlight brain regions selectively supporting mental time travel in EAM.