Mental simulation of routes during navigation involves adaptive temporal compression.

ABSTRACT: Mental simulation is a hallmark feature of human cognition, allowing features from memories to be flexibly used during prospection. While past studies demonstrate the preservation of real-world features such as size and distance during mental simulation, their temporal dynamics remains unknown. Here, we compare mental simulations to navigation of routes in a large-scale spatial environment to test the hypothesis that such simulations are temporally compressed in an adaptive manner. Our results show that simulations occurred at 2.39× the speed it took to navigate a route, increasing in compression (3.57×) for slower movement speeds. Participant self-reports of vividness and spatial coherence of simulations also correlated strongly with simulation duration, providing an important link betwee

SUBMITTER: Arnold AEGF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5143185 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature