Dissociable Neural Contributions To Prospection During Decisions About The Future

Humans often make decisions that involve tradeoffs between immediate and delayed consequences, and tend to devalue or discount future outcomes. This phenomenon, known as delay discounting, has several real-world implications. A high discounter, indicating more impulsive behavior, is more likely to engage in risky behavior such as smoking or gambling, while a low discounter, exhibiting more patient behavior, is more likely to attain better educational and financial outcomes. Recent studies demonstrate that under certain conditions, imagining the future reduces discounting. The goal of this thesis is to examine the cognitive role and neural basis of imagination during intertemporal choice, and investigate the mechanisms by which imagination influences decision-making. Chapter 2 examines how specific components of imagination modulate activity in specific nodes of the default mode network. We find that two components of imagination, construction and evaluation, distinctly activate the dorsal and ventral nodes of the default mode network, demonstrating separate modifiability and indicating a role for multiple processes underlying imagination. Chapter 3 extends this finding by examining activity in these nodes while participants are completing a choice task. Since tangibility and value are often confounded in intertemporal choice, we used our neural markers of construction and evaluation from Chapter 2 to disentangle these distinct components during choice. Though we find that activity in evaluative regions increases when individuals choose a delayed option, we also find greater activity in constructive regions when individuals choose a delayed outcome, indicating that chosen options are perhaps imagined more vividly than unchosen ones. Further, greater activity in constructive regions seems to be driven by high discounters, suggesting that higher discounters rely on vividness to a greater extent during choice than lower discounters. We extend this finding in Chapter 4 by investigating the effects of behavioral interventions of the constructive component on delay discounting. Surprisingly, we find that being a better visualizer is correlated with steeper discounting, and long-term training in visualization of personal future goals leads to greater impulsive behavior. Together, these findings advance our understanding of how specific imagination processes influence decision-making through differential neural activity, laying the groundwork for implementing targeted, personally-tailored future interventions to reduce risky behavior

The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain

During the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in research examining the role of memory in imagination and future thinking. This work has revealed striking similarities between remembering the past and imagining or simulating the future, including the finding that a common brain network underlies both memory and imagination. Here we discuss a number of key points that have emerged during recent years, focusing in particular on the importance of distinguishing between temporal and non-temporal factors in analyses of memory and imagination, the nature of differences between remembering the past and imagining the future, the identification of component processes that comprise the default network supporting memory- based simulations, and the finding that this network can couple flexibly with other networks to support complex goal-directed simulations. This growing area of research has broadened our conception of memory by highlighting the many ways in which memory supports adaptive functioning.Psycholog

Your space or mine? : Mapping self in time

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Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: A dual process account

© 2019 Springer Nature.This is the final published version of an article published in Psychological Research, licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-bution 4.0 International License. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01262-7.In this article, we address an apparent paradox in the literature on mental time travel and mind-wandering: How is it possible that future thinking is both constructive, yet often experienced as occurring spontaneously? We identify and describe two ‘routes’ whereby episodic future thoughts are brought to consciousness, with each of the ‘routes’ being associated with separable cognitive processes and functions. Voluntary future thinking relies on controlled, deliberate and slow cognitive processing. The other, termed involuntary or spontaneous future thinking, relies on automatic processes that allows ‘fully-fledged’ episodic future thoughts to freely come to mind, often triggered by internal or external cues. To unravel the paradox, we propose that the majority of spontaneous future thoughts are ‘pre-made’ (i.e., each spontaneous future thought is a re-iteration of a previously constructed future event), and therefore based on simple, well-understood, memory processes. We also propose that the pre-made hypothesis explains why spontaneous future thoughts occur rapidly, are similar to involuntary memories, and predominantly about upcoming tasks and goals. We also raise the possibility that spontaneous future thinking is the default mode of imagining the future. This dual process approach complements and extends standard theoretical approaches that emphasise constructive simulation, and outlines novel opportunities for researchers examining voluntary and spontaneous forms of future thinking.Peer reviewe

Individual differences in social reward and threat expectancies linked to grey matter volumes in key regions of the social brain

Prospection (mentally simulating future events) generates emotionally charged mental images that guide social decision-making. Positive and negative social expectancies - imagining new social interactions to be rewarding vs. threatening - are core components of social approach and avoidance motivation, respectively. Stable individual differences in such positive and negative future-related cognitions may be underpinned by distinct neuroanatomical substrates. Here, we asked 100 healthy adults to vividly imagine themselves in a novel self-relevant social scenario that was ambiguous with regards to possible social acceptance or rejection. During this task we measured their expectancies for social reward (e.g. anticipated feelings of social connection) or threat (e.g. anticipated feelings of rejection). On a separate day they underwent structural MRI; voxel-based morphometry (VBM) was used to explore the relation between their social reward and threat expectancies and regional grey matter volumes (rGMV). Increased rGMV in key regions involved in prospection, subjective valuation and emotion regulation (including ventromedial prefrontal cortex), correlated with both higher social reward and lower social threat expectancies. In contrast, social threat expectancies were uniquely linked with rGMV of regions involved in social attention (posterior superior temporal sulcus) and interoception (somatosensory cortex). These findings provide novel insight into the neurobiology of future-oriented cognitive-affective processes critical to adaptive social functioning

Self-Affirmation Activates Brain Systems Associated with Self-Related Processing and Reward and is Reinforced by Future Orientation

Self-affirmation theory posits that people are motivated to maintain a positive self-view and that threats to perceived self-competence are met with resistance. When threatened, self-affirmations can restore self-competence by allowing individuals to reflect on sources of self-worth, such as core values. Many questions exist, however, about the underlying mechanisms associated with self-affirmation. We examined the neural mechanisms of self-affirmation with a task developed for use in a functional magnetic resonance imaging environment. Results of a region of interest analysis demonstrated that participants who were affirmed (compared with unaffirmed participants) showed increased activity in key regions of the brain’s self-processing (medial prefrontal cortex + posterior cingulate cortex) and valuation (ventral striatum + ventral medial prefrontal cortex) systems when reflecting on future-oriented core values (compared with everyday activities). Furthermore, this neural activity went on to predict changes in sedentary behavior consistent with successful affirmation in response to a separate physical activity intervention. These results highlight neural processes associated with successful self-affirmation, and further suggest that key pathways may be amplified in conjunction with prospection