Research Article The Role of Perspective in Mental Time Travel Caterina Ansuini, 1 Andrea Cavallo, 2 Lorenzo Pia, 3 and Cristina Becchio 1,2 1 Department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16163 Genoa, Italy 2 Department of Psychology, University of Torino, 10123 Turin, Italy 3 SpAtial, Motor & Bodily Awareness (SAMBA) Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Torino, 10123 Turin, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Cristina Becchio; cristina.becchio@unito.it Received 28 August 2015; Revised 22 October 2015; Accepted 2 November 2015 Academic Editor: Domenica Bueti Copyright © 2016 Caterina Ansuini et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Recent years have seen accumulating evidence for the proposition that people process time by mapping it onto a linear spatial representation and automatically “project” themselves on an imagined mental time line. Here, we ask whether people can adopt the temporal perspective of another person when travelling through time. To elucidate similarities and diferences between time travelling from one’s own perspective or from the perspective of another person, we asked participants to mentally project themselves or someone else (i.e., a coexperimenter) to diferent time points. Tree basic properties of mental time travel were manipulated: temporal location (i.e., where in time the travel originates: past, present, and future), motion direction (either backwards or forwards), and temporal duration (i.e., the distance to travel: one, three, or fve years). We found that time travels originating in the present lasted longer in the self- than in the other-perspective. Moreover, for self-perspective, but not for other- perspective, time was diferently scaled depending on where in time the travel originated. In contrast, when considering the direction and the duration of time travelling, no dissimilarities between the self- and the other-perspective emerged. Tese results suggest that self- and other-projection, despite some diferences, share important similarities in structure. 1. Introduction When imagining time and their own life events, humans do not only retrieve or predict when events have occurred or will occur, but also automatically “project” themselves on an imagined mental time line [1]. Self-time travelling can thus be regarded as the ability to transpose one’s habitual self-location in time to diferent temporal “locations” in the past or the future [2]. Emphasizing the role of perspective taking, this ability to change one’s own temporal egocentric perspective has been proposed to share a common mechanism with the ability to change one’s own spatial egocentric perspective [3]. In both domains, people would use existing representations as templates for processing and understanding new informa- tion, in order to plan their short- and long-term behaviors. On this account, the same processes that subserve simulation of the self at a diferent location in space would also subserve simulation of the self at a diferent point in time [4]. An interesting question, inspired by this parallel, is whether, similarly to taking another person’s spatial per- spective, people can also adopt the temporal perspective of another person when travelling through time. Studies inves- tigating spatial perspective taking indicate that people can overcome their own position in space to adopt another per- son’s spatial perspective (e.g., [5]). When the scene includes another person, for instance, people may spontaneously describe spatial relations from that person’s perspective despite the very real presence of their own [5, 6]. Tese and other fndings suggest that spatial perspective taking may induce an alterocentric remapping, that is, remapping of objects and locations to an alterocentric frame of reference [7]. To our best knowledge, no study has so far investigated whether a similar remapping may take place in the temporal domain. In other words, whether similarly to taking another Hindawi Publishing Corporation Neural Plasticity Volume 2016, Article ID 3052741, 8 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/3052741