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Mental Time Travel without Visual Experience

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Nadja Abdel Kafi^1,2 (), Marie Malinowski², Anja Essmann², Pitshaporn Leelaarporn^1,2, Julia Taube^1,2, Sven Lange², Katharina Wall³, Bettina Wabbels³, Cornelia McCormick^1,2; ¹Department of Old Age Psychiatry and Cognitive Disorders, University Hospital Bonn, Bonn, Germany, ²German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Bonn, Germany, ³Department of Ophtalmology, University Hospital Bonn, Bonn, Germany

Visual mental images help us recall autobiographical memories (AMs) and envision the future, collectively referred to as mental time travel (MTT). It is unclear how congenitally and late blind individuals, without the opportunity to encode visual images, engage in MTT. Our study included three groups: congenitally blind (CB; n = 21), late blind (LB; n = 22), and sighted controls (CTL; n = 34). Participants answered mental imagery questionnaires (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire) and completed the Autobiographical Memory Interview and Scene Construction (SC) Interview. During 3-Tesla fMRI scans, participants retrieved AMs and engaged in SC based on auditory word cues. Interviews were scored for episodic details (e.g., perceptual, thoughts/emotions) and combined into unified MTT scores. Results showed that the CB group only rated visual mental imagery lower than the other groups across questionnaires (all p<.001). In the interviews, no group differences were found for the ratio of episodic details to total word count (p = .16). While interviews of CB participants were characterized by a significantly lower proportion of perceptual details, the proportion of conceptual details (i.e., thoughts/emotions) was significantly higher than that in the CTL and LB group (all p<.05). fMRI analyses revealed that the MTT of CB participants was characterized by higher precuneus activation compared to CTLs (p<0.0001), while the parahippocampal place area was more activated in CTLs compared to the other groups (all p<0.001). Results suggest that the absence of vision changes the content of MTT but keeps episodic reliving intact.

Topic Area: OTHER