With the power of the inner eyes
The late positive potential during mental time travel through positive and negative experiences. An event-related potential study
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7163316 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matthias Pillny (0000-0003-2395-8433, Universität Hamburg, corresponding author), Kai Härpfer (0000-0002-9762-2839, Universität Hamburg), Hannes Per Carsten (0000-0001-7327-4385, Universität Hamburg), Tania M Lincoln (0000-0002-6674-2440, Universität Hamburg), Anja Riesel (0000-0002-1902-6644, Universität Hamburg) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 9 |
| Pages | 1111-1128 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-21 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Memory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0965-8211 • E-ISSN: 1464-0686 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09658211.2025.2554283 |
| PMID | 40976682 |
| OpenAlex | W4414403959 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 78 |
Mental time travel involves mental imagery to recollect past experiences and envision future events, eliciting anticipatory emotional responses that motivate goal-directed behaviour. However, the temporal dynamics of neural, physiological, and affective processing of mental time travel remain elusive. This study examined late positive potential (LPP), skin conductance responses (SCR), and behavioural affect ratings in response to mental time travel. Forty-eight participants (52% female) viewed 16 neutral, positive, and negative stimuli from the International Affective Picture System ("encoding task"). Participants then vividly imagined the stimuli ("recall task") and imagined a scenario involving the presented stimuli as if it might occur after leaving the lab ("prospection task"). Results showed enhanced LPP amplitudes when recalling negative and prospecting positive experiences, alongside elevated self-reported affect and arousal during these emotional recall and prospection tasks. These findings suggest that mental time travel through emotionally salient events is associated with increased LPP amplitudes akin to the processing of immediate experiences. This might reflect a neural mechanism of anticipatory affective responses to mental representations
Arousal · Chronesthesia · Mental image · Mental state · Recall · Salient · Skin conductance · Cognitive Abilities and Testing · Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies · Psychological and Temporal Perspectives Research
Ggplot2
Memory enhancement for emotional words
Affective Forecasting
Episodic future thinking
Memory and consciousness.
The human imagination
Emotion and the motivational brain
Fixed and random effects models
Prospection
Eta squared and partial eta squared as measures of effect size in educational research
Event-Related Potentials, Emotion, and Emotion Regulation
Neural foundations of imagery
A continuous measure of phasic electrodermal activity
Brain potentials in affective picture processing
The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory
Mental Imagery
Effectsize
Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing
Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4
LmerTest Package
Mental Time Travel? A Neurocognitive Model of Event Simulation
Uncertainty salience reduces the accessibility of episodic future thoughts
Psychophysiological responses to unpredictable threat
Beyond good and evil
The persistence of attention to emotion
Emotion and motivation I
The past of predicting the future
Autobiographical memory impairments as a transdiagnostic feature of mental illness
| Highly cited | No |
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