Bulganin Lisa, Wittmann Bianca C
Department of Psychology, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany.
PLoS One. 2015 Nov 23;10(11):e0143477. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0143477. eCollection 2015.
Thinking about personal future events is a fundamental cognitive process that helps us make choices in daily life. We investigated how the imagination of episodic future events is influenced by implicit motivational factors known to guide decision making. In a two-day functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we controlled learned reward association and stimulus novelty by pre-familiarizing participants with two sets of words in a reward learning task. Words were repeatedly presented and consistently followed by monetary reward or no monetary outcome. One day later, participants imagined personal future events based on previously rewarded, unrewarded and novel words. Reward association enhanced the perceived vividness of the imagined scenes. Reward and novelty-based construction of future events were associated with higher activation of the motivational system (striatum and substantia nigra/ ventral tegmental area) and hippocampus, and functional connectivity between these areas increased during imagination of events based on reward-associated and novel words. These data indicate that implicit past motivational experience contributes to our expectation of what the future holds in store.
思考个人未来事件是一种基本的认知过程，有助于我们在日常生活中做出选择。我们研究了情景性未来事件的想象如何受到已知指导决策的内隐动机因素的影响。在一项为期两天的功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究中，我们通过在奖励学习任务中让参与者预先熟悉两组单词来控制习得的奖励关联和刺激新颖性。单词被反复呈现，并始终伴随着金钱奖励或无金钱结果。一天后，参与者根据先前有奖励、无奖励和新颖的单词想象个人未来事件。奖励关联增强了想象场景的感知生动性。基于奖励和新颖性构建未来事件与动机系统（纹状体和黑质/腹侧被盖区）和海马体的更高激活相关，并且在基于奖励关联和新颖单词的事件想象过程中，这些区域之间的功能连接增加。这些数据表明，过去的内隐动机体验有助于我们对未来的预期。
