Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2022 May 9:13:858001.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.858001. eCollection 2022.

Mental Time Travel and Time Reference Difficulties in Alzheimer's Disease: Are They Related? A Systematic Review

Evodie Schaffner  1 , Mélanie Sandoz  1 , Cristina Grisot  2 , Noémie Auclair-Ouellet  3 , Marion Fossard  1
Affiliations
Review

Mental Time Travel and Time Reference Difficulties in Alzheimer's Disease: Are They Related? A Systematic Review

Evodie Schaffner et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Mental time travel and language enable us to go back and forth in time and to organize and express our personal experiences through time reference. People with Alzheimer's disease have both mental time travel and time reference impairments, which can greatly impact their daily communication. Currently, little is known about the potential relationship between time conceptualization (i.e., mental time travel) and time reference difficulties in this disease. A systematic review of the literature was performed to determine if this link had already been investigated. Only three articles integrated both time conceptualization and time reference measures. However, the link between the two was not systematically analyzed and interpreted. This review highlights the lack of research addressing the question of the influence of time conceptualization impairments in Alzheimer's disease on other cognitive domains, and especially language.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; mental time travel; time conceptualization; time reference; verbal inflection.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow diagram of the identification and selection of records, adapted from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) flow diagram (Page et al., 2021b).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Addis D. R., Sacchetti D. C., Ally B. A., Budson A. E., Schacter D. L. (2009). Episodic simulation of future events is impaired in mild Alzheimer’s disease. Neuropsychologia 47, 2660–2671. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.05.018, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Addis D. R., Tippett L. J. (2004). Memory of myself: autobiographical memory and identity in Alzheimer’s disease. Memory 12, 56–74. doi: 10.1080/09658210244000423, PMID: - DOI - PubMed
    1. Ahmed S., Haigh A.-M. F., de Jager C. A., Garrard P. (2013). Connected speech as a marker of disease progression in autopsy-proven Alzheimer’s disease. Brain 136, 3727–3737. doi: 10.1093/brain/awt269, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Albert M. S., DeKosky S. T., Dickson D., Dubois B., Feldman H. H., Fox N. C., et al. . (2011). The diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease: recommendations from the National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s association workgroups on diagnostic guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimers Dement. 7, 270–279. doi: 10.1016/j.jalz.2011.03.008, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Auclair-Ouellet N. (2015). Inflectional morphology in primary progressive aphasia and Alzheimer’s disease: a systematic review. J. Neurol. 34, 41–64. doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2014.12.002 - DOI

LinkOut - more resources