Departmentof Cognitive Sciences, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2010 Aug;22(8):1701-13. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21314.
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.
情景式未来思维使人类能够在心理上模拟几乎无限的未来可能性，但这种思维方式从根本上是目标导向的，不应将其等同于幻想或一厢情愿的想法。本 fMRI 研究的目的是探究在未来事件模拟中进行这种目标导向处理的神经基础。在参与者进行想象未来事件的过程中对他们进行扫描，这些未来事件与他们的个人目标（个人未来事件）有关，也有一些是合理但与他们的个人目标无关的未来事件（非个人未来事件）。结果表明，与想象非个人未来事件相比，想象个人未来事件会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（即对自己的个性特征做出判断）所引起的激活重叠，这表明腹侧 MPFC 和 PCC 在不同的功能领域中介导自我参照处理。这些脑区可能支持一系列过程，这些过程评估、编码并将心理表象与个人目标的相关性置于语境之中。还讨论了这些发现对理解大脑默认网络所体现的功能的意义。
