What is it about?
The representation of time seems to have spatial properties and seems to be represented in a left-to-right "mental time line" (MTL). We studied a group of spatial neglect (SN) patients and a control group of healthy participants in a spatio-temporal compatibility task (STEARC task). The results showed that the more a patient suffered from SN, the smaller the accuracy difference was between the left and right side responses for short durations.
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Why is it important?
These findings corroborate the hypothesis that the presence of disorders in spatial attention can affect the mental time line representation, suggesting a critical role of spatial attention for the emergence of a spatial representation of time durations.
Perspectives
The present study corroborates and extends previous literature on the critical role of spatial attention mechanisms in generating a mental time line, which is indeed disrupted proportionally with the presence of disorders in spatial attention. Future work involving the recruitment of a higher number of patients should unveil which brain areas are critically involved in the crosstalk between space and time representations. The present study represents a specific contribution to the hot debate on how mental and neural representations of abstract concepts, which cannot be directly experienced through our senses, may partially rely on our richer spatial representations.
Dr Marco Pitteri
Universita degli Studi di Verona
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mental time line distortion in right-brain-damaged patients: Evidence from a dynamic spatiotemporal task., Neuropsychology, March 2016, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/neu0000211.
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