Department of Psychology and Centre for Neurocognitive Research, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria.
Neuroimage. 2013 May 15;72:265-71. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.01.060. Epub 2013 Feb 4.
Counterfactual thinking is ubiquitous in everyday life and an important aspect of cognition and emotion. Although counterfactual thought has been argued to differ from processing factual or hypothetical information, imaging data which elucidate these differences on a neural level are still scarce. We investigated the neural correlates of processing counterfactual sentences under visual and aural presentation. We compared conditionals in subjunctive mood which explicitly contradicted previously presented facts (i.e. counterfactuals) to conditionals framed in indicative mood which did not contradict factual world knowledge and thus conveyed a hypothetical supposition. Our results show activation in right occipital cortex (cuneus) and right basal ganglia (caudate nucleus) during counterfactual sentence processing. Importantly the occipital activation is not only present under visual presentation but also with purely auditory stimulus presentation, precluding a visual processing artifact. Thus our results can be interpreted as reflecting the fact that counterfactual conditionals pragmatically imply the relevance of keeping in mind both factual and supposed information whereas the hypothetical conditionals imply that real world information is irrelevant for processing the conditional and can be omitted. The need to sustain representations of factual and suppositional events during counterfactual sentence processing requires increased mental imagery and integration efforts. Our findings are compatible with predictions based on mental model theory.
反事实思维在日常生活中无处不在，是认知和情绪的一个重要方面。尽管反事实思维被认为与处理事实或假设信息不同，但阐明这些差异的神经影像学数据仍然很少。我们研究了在视觉和听觉呈现下处理反事实句子的神经相关性。我们将明确与先前呈现的事实（即反事实）相矛盾的虚拟语气条件句与不与事实世界知识相矛盾、因此传达假设假设的陈述语气条件句进行了比较。我们的研究结果表明，在反事实句子处理过程中，右枕叶皮层（楔叶）和右基底神经节（尾状核）会被激活。重要的是，这种枕叶激活不仅存在于视觉呈现下，也存在于纯粹的听觉刺激呈现下，排除了视觉处理假象的可能性。因此，我们的结果可以解释为，反事实条件句在语用学上暗示了记住事实和假设信息的相关性，而假设条件句则暗示了处理条件所需的现实世界信息是不相关的，可以省略。在反事实句子处理过程中维持事实和假设事件的表示需要增加心理意象和整合努力。我们的发现与基于心理模型理论的预测是一致的。
