Stillman Paul E, Lee Hyojin, Deng Xiaoyan, Unnava H Rao, Cunningham William A, Fujita Kentaro
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
Department of Marketing, Lucas College and Graduate School of Business, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Jun 1;12(6):937-947. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx022.
The ability to mentally represent future events is a significant human psychological achievement. A challenge that people encounter is that they often lack detailed specifics about distant relative to near future events. Construal level theory proposes that people represent distant future events by their abstract and essential features-a process referred to as high-level construal. As events become temporally proximal, people represent events by their increasingly available and reliable concrete and idiosyncratic features-a process referred to as low-level construal. The present fMRI experiment provides direct neural evidence for these assertions. Using the why-how localizer as a measure of construal level, results revealed brain regions associated with both temporal distance and high-level construal (medial prefrontal cortex), as well as temporal proximity and low-level construal (precuneus). We discuss the implications of these findings for the neuroscience of mental time travel and cognitive representation.
在心理上表征未来事件的能力是人类一项重要的心理成就。人们面临的一个挑战是，相对于近期事件，他们往往缺乏关于遥远未来事件的详细具体信息。解释水平理论提出，人们通过抽象和本质特征来表征遥远的未来事件——这一过程被称为高水平解释。随着事件在时间上越来越接近，人们通过越来越容易获得且可靠的具体和独特特征来表征事件——这一过程被称为低水平解释。目前的功能磁共振成像实验为这些论断提供了直接的神经证据。使用“为什么-如何”定位任务作为解释水平的一种测量方法，结果揭示了与时间距离和高水平解释相关的脑区（内侧前额叶皮质），以及与时间接近性和低水平解释相关的脑区（楔前叶）。我们讨论了这些发现对心理时间旅行和认知表征神经科学的意义。
