Nyberg et al. (2010) reported that left lateral parietal cortex, as well as left frontal

cortex, cerebellum, and thalamus were preferentially engaged as participants thought about taking walks in the past or future as compared to taking the same walk in the present moment. By contrast, many default network regions that had shown increased activity during remembering the past and imagining the future in previous studies (e.g., medial temporal lobe, medial prefrontal cortex, retrosplenial cortex) did not show preferential activation Selleckchem GW3965 when thinking about taking walks in the past and future tasks as compared with the present moment. Although interpretation of these findings depends critically on the extent to which the training given to participants indeed allowed them to remain in the present moment during the mental walk task, they suggest that only some regions are specifically related to chronesthesia or mental time travel (for related evidence, see Arzy et al., 2008, 2009). Further highlighting a possible role for temporal factors, recent behavioral studies have revealed individual differences in the feeling of experiencing

simulations of future events (Arnold et al., 2011b; D’Argembeau et al., 2010a; Quoidbach SB431542 in vivo et al., 2008) along with asymmetries in the way that people think about the past and the future.

For instance, Van Boven and Caruso and their colleagues have shown that people experience more intense emotions when they anticipate future experiences than when they retrospect about past experiences, either actual or hypothetical (Caruso, 2010; Caruso et al., 2008; Van Boven and Ashworth, 2007). Nonetheless, an in depth understanding of the brain bases of subjective experiences associated with mental time travel awaits future research. Taken together with the studies considered earlier in this section, we conclude that studies of remembering the past and imagining the future can potentially inform our understanding found of the relation between memory and imagination, independent of temporal factors (cf., Eacott and Easton, 2012), but can also inform our understanding of mental time travel or chronesthesia, when possible differences between memory and imagination are held constant. However, distinguishing between these factors requires careful experimental designs that precisely target specific processes of interest. Simple comparisons between remembering the past and imagining the future cannot alone disentangle the contributions of temporal and non-temporal factors.