Mental Time Travel (MTT) refers to the ability to re-experience past events and anticipate possible future events through mental simulation. It plays an important role in our daily lives to facilitate optimal social functioning. Recent findings suggest that individuals with high levels of schizotypy have poor MTT. However, the underlying psychological process and neural mechanism for this MTT problem are not fully understood.

To address this issue, Drs. WANG Ya and Raymond Chan from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have conducted a study to investigate the neural correlates of MTT in 38 participants with high level of schizotypy and 35 low level of schizotypy. All of them completed a task-based MTT paradigm while they were undertaking brain scan.

The MTT imaging paradigm required all the participants to recall past events, imagine possible future events related to cue words, or generate exemplars related to category words. With regard to the ability to recall past events, the results showed greater activation in precuneus, bilateral posterior cingulate cortex, thalamus, and middle frontal gyrus than with episodic future thinking.

In particular, participants with high levels of schizotypy showed less activation in the left anterior cingulate cortex when recalling the past events and in the medial frontal gyrus during envisioning possible future events compared to participants with low level of schizotypy.

In addition, participants with high level of schizotypy also exhibited functional connectivity between left anterior cingulate cortex and right thalamus, between medial frontal gyrus (seed) and left cerebellum while they were performing the MTT task. However, participants with low level of schizotypy did not exhibit these functional connectivities.

Taken together, these preliminary findings suggest that reduced brain activation may underlie MTT deficits in individuals with high levels of schizotypy. These findings have implications for the formulation and development of intervention for people with MTT problems or impairments.

This study was published in Neuropsychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry on Feb. 14 and was supported by the National Science Foundation of China and the Philip KH Wong Foundation.