Neural representation of time across complementary reference frames.

Résumé

Humans conceptualize time in terms of space, allowing flexible time construals from various perspectives. We can travel internally through a timeline to remember the past and imagine the future (i.e., mental time travel) or watch from an external standpoint to have a panoramic view of history (i.e., mental time watching). However, the neural mechanisms that support these flexible temporal construals remain unclear. To investigate this, we asked participants to learn a fictional religious ritual of 15 events. During fMRI scanning, they were guided to consider the event series from either an internal or external perspective in different tasks. Behavioral results confirmed the success of our manipulation, showing the expected symbolic distance effect in the internal-perspective task and the reverse effect in the external-perspective task. We found that the activation level in the posterior parietal cortex correlated positively with sequential distance in the external-perspective task but negatively in the internal-perspective task. In contrast, the activation level in the anterior hippocampus positively correlated with sequential distance regardless of the observer's perspectives. These results suggest that the hippocampus stores the memory of the event sequences allocentrically in a perspective-agnostic manner. Conversely, the posterior parietal cortex retrieves event sequences egocentrically from the optimal perspective for the current task context. Such complementary allocentric and egocentric representations support both the stability of memory storage and the flexibility of time construals.