抄録
Temporal mental orientation is a brain function that enables us to roam from the memorized past to the imaginable future. Previous studies have reported that mental orientation in spatial dimension correlated with activation of multiple cortical areas, including the posterior medial portion of the parietal lobe and precuneus. In contrast, the neural correlates of temporal mental orientation remain unclear. The present study performed a verbal experiment to investigate the neurophysiological correlates of temporal mental orientation. Neurophysiological activities were recorded extracranially, as participants processed sentences with correct or incorrect temporal orientations. We conducted time-domain and signal source estimation analyses. We observed that right frontal positive and centro-parietal negative event-related brain potential amplitudes increased for the incorrect temporal orientation, compared to that for correct orientation. Signal source estimation analysis demonstrated that these neural activities originated from the superior parietal areas, including the right precuneus, which functionally connected with the left precentral or premotor areas. The present findings suggest that the fronto-parietal functional connection contributes to temporal mental orientation.
