ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Brain system for mental orientation in space, time, and person.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT03030365 (The Orientation System, the Default-network and Brain Metabolism in Patients With Early Stage Alzheimer's Disease), which is not on this map. Cited by 123 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
The Orientation System, the Default-network and Brain Metabolism in Patients With Early Stage Alzheimer's Disease: a Multimodal Functional Study.
Who cites it
123 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 301 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Oscillatory alpha power at rest reveals an independent self: A cross-cultural investigation.Biological psychology · 2021Pooled it
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- Mindful attention promotes control of brain network dynamics for self-regulation and discontinues the past from the present.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Trial
- Effect of Probiotic Bifidobacterium breve in Improving Cognitive Function and Preventing Brain Atrophy in Older Patients with Suspected Mild Cognitive Impairment: Results of a 24-Week Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial.Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD · 2022Trial
- Brain neuromarkers predict self- and other-related mentalizing across adult, clinical, and developmental samples.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Space and time in words: exploring neural overlap and specificity.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2025Article
- Determining the potential benefits of error feedback and metacognition on perceptual learning in the temporal and spatial domain.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Old-New Recognition Memory Revisited.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Neural Representation of Episodic Time.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
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- Parallel systems for social and spatial cognition reaching the cortical apex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Latent Cognitive Profiles Predict 1-Year Mental Health, Insomnia, Falls, Daily Functioning, and Pain in US Older Adults: A National Longitudinal Study.Journal of the American Medical Directors Association · 2025Article
- Investigating the associations between tau and mental orientation among cognitively unimpaired individuals.Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD · 2025Article
- How the New Interacts With the Old? Hippocampal Processing During Memory Encoding of Creative Associations With Remote or Close Inherent Semantic Relatedness.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Cognitive maps for hierarchical spaces in the human brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Pragmatics partially segregated from Theory of Mind: evidence from resting-state functional connectivity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Effect of APOE ε4 Allele on Dynamic Local Spontaneous Brain Activity and Functional Integration in Alzheimer's Disease.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Latent cognitive profiles and their associations with instrumental activities of daily living among older adults without dementia: A United States national cross-sectional study.The journal of prevention of Alzheimer's disease · 2025Article
63 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Orientation is a fundamental mental function that processes the relations between the behaving self to space (places), time (events), and person (people). Behavioral and neuroimaging studies have hinted at interrelations between processing of these three domains. To unravel the neurocognitive basis of orientation, we used high-resolution 7T functional MRI as 16 subjects compared their subjective distance to different places, events, or people. Analysis at the individual-subject level revealed cortical activation related to orientation in space, time, and person in a precisely localized set of structures in the precuneus, inferior parietal, and medial frontal cortex. Comparison of orientation domains revealed a consistent order of cortical activity inside the precuneus and inferior parietal lobes, with space orientation activating posterior regions, followed anteriorly by person and then time. Core regions at the precuneus and inferior parietal lobe were activated for multiple orientation domains, suggesting also common processing for orientation across domains. The medial prefrontal cortex showed a posterior activation for time and anterior for person. Finally, the default-mode network, identified in a separate resting-state scan, was active for all orientation domains and overlapped mostly with person-orientation regions. These findings suggest that mental orientation in space, time, and person is managed by a specific brain system with a highly ordered internal organization, closely related to the default-mode network.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.