The Neural Basis of Personal Goal Processing When Envisioning Future Events
The Neural Basis of Personal Goal Processing When Envisioning Future Events
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DOI：
10.1162/jocn.2009.21314
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发表时间：
2010-08-01
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Salmon, Eric
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D'Argembeau, Arnaud;Stawarczyk, David;Salmon, Eric
情景未来思维允许人类在精神上模拟几乎无限的未来可能性，但这种设备从根本上是目标导向的，不应该等同于幻想或一厢情愿的想法。本研究的目的是探讨未来事件模拟过程中这种目标导向加工的神经基础。参与者在想象与个人目标相关的未来事件（个人未来事件）和看似合理但与个人目标无关的未来事件（非个人未来事件）时被扫描。结果表明，与想象非个人未来事件相比，想象个人未来事件引起腹内侧前额叶皮层（MPFC）和后扣带回皮层（PCC）更强的激活。此外，这些大脑激活与第二个任务引起的激活重叠，第二个任务评估语义自我知识（即，对自己的人格特质作出判断），表明腹侧MPFC和PCC介导不同功能域的自我参照处理。这表明，这些大脑区域可能支持的过程，评估，编码和语境化的心理表征与个人目标的相关性的集合。这些发现的影响，为理解的功能实例化的默认网络的大脑进行了讨论。
Episodic future thinking allows humans to mentally simulate virtually infinite future possibilities, yet this device is fundamentally goal-directed and should not be equated with fantasizing or wishful thinking. The purpose of this fMRI study was to investigate the neural basis of such goal-directed processing during future-event simulation. Participants were scanned while they imagined future events that were related to their personal goals (personal future events) and future events that were plausible but unrelated to their personal goals (nonpersonal future events). Results showed that imaging personal future events elicited stronger activation in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) compared to imaging nonpersonal future events. Moreover, these brain activations overlapped with activations elicited by a second task that assessed semantic self-knowledge (i.e., making judgments on one's own personality traits), suggesting that ventral MPFC and PCC mediate self-referential processing across different functional domains. It is suggested that these brain regions may support a collection of processes that evaluate, code, and contextualize the relevance of mental representations with regard to personal goals. The implications of these findings for the understanding of the function instantiated by the default network of the brain are also discussed.