Viagem mental através do tempo: revisão sistemática

• Main Author: Álvaro Machado Dias
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Florida 2012-01-01
• Series: Interamerican Journal of Psychology
• Online Access: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=28425871001

The ability to leave aside the mental experience of the present and wander toward the past or the future (mental time travel/MTT) is essential to many complex cognitive dynamics. Objetives: The aims of the current study are two-folded: to provide a general overview of the literature on MTT and to present the results of a review of neuroimaging studies on the matter. Method: Data and text mining software were used in order to reach a systematic overview of the main trends of the literature, based upon which an original conception of MTT was proposed, in line with some original perspectives on its neurobiological structure. Results: The review of the literature shows that there are no studies on MTT in decision-making, it also shows the existence of nine neuroimaging and one meta-analysis. There is a debate regarding the extent to which non-human animals show MTT; our perspectives on MTT rely on the mental processing of the present, in opposition to more traditional approaches, which tend to focus the relation between MTT and memory. A new hypothesis on the cognitive basis of the ability that we all have to differentiate, introspectively, the prospection of future scenarios from memory is introduced, inspired by the corollary discharge model.