How do we decide what to do? Resting-state connectivity patterns and components of self-generated thought linked to the development of more concrete personal goals

Experimental Brain Research, Aug 2018

Human cognition is not limited to the available environmental input but can consider realities that are different to the here and now. We describe the cognitive states and neural processes linked to the refinement of descriptions of personal goals. When personal goals became concrete, participants reported greater thoughts about the self and the future during mind-wandering. This pattern was not observed for descriptions of TV programmes. Connectivity analysis of participants who underwent a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scan revealed neural traits associated with this pattern. Strong hippocampal connectivity with ventromedial pre-frontal cortex was common to better-specified descriptions of goals and TV programmes, while connectivity between hippocampus and the pre-supplementary motor area was associated with individuals whose goals were initially abstract but became more concrete over the course of the experiment. We conclude that self-generated cognition that arises during the mind-wandering state can allow goals to be refined, and this depends on neural systems anchored in the hippocampus.

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How do we decide what to do? Resting-state connectivity patterns and components of self-generated thought linked to the development of more concrete personal goals

How do we decide what to do? Resting‑state connectivity patterns and components of self‑generated thought linked to the development of more concrete personal goals Barbara Medea 0 1 2 Theodoros Karapanagiotidis 0 1 2 Mahiko Konishi 0 1 2 Cristina Ottaviani 0 1 2 Daniel Margulies 0 1 2 Andrea Bernasconi 0 1 2 Neda Bernasconi 0 1 2 Boris C. Bernhardt 0 1 2 Elizabeth Jefferies 0 1 2 Jonathan Smallwood 0 1 2 0 Neuroimaging Laboratory, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation , Rome , Italy 1 Neuroimaging of Epilepsy Lab, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University , Quebec , Canada 2 Neuroanatomy and Connectivity Group, Max Planck Institute for Human and Cognitive Brain Sciences , Leipzig , Germany 3 Jonathan Smallwood Human cognition is not limited to the available environmental input but can consider realities that are different to the here and now. We describe the cognitive states and neural processes linked to the refinement of descriptions of personal goals. When personal goals became concrete, participants reported greater thoughts about the self and the future during mind-wandering. This pattern was not observed for descriptions of TV programmes. Connectivity analysis of participants who underwent a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scan revealed neural traits associated with this pattern. Strong hippocampal connectivity with ventromedial pre-frontal cortex was common to better-specified descriptions of goals and TV programmes, while connectivity between hippocampus and the pre-supplementary motor area was associated with individuals whose goals were initially abstract but became more concrete over the course of the experiment. We conclude that self-generated cognition that arises during the mindwandering state can allow goals to be refined, and this depends on neural systems anchored in the hippocampus. Mind-wandering; Goals; Future thought; Hippocampus Department of Psychology, York Neuroimaging Centre, University of York, Heslington, York, UK Neuroanatomy and Connectivity Group, Max Planck Institute for Human and Cognitive Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany Introduction Although acting in the moment satisfies many of our primary needs, important achievements—such as constructing the pyramids or landing on the moon—involve the capacity to represent things that could be the case, allowing the generation of a series of steps that can make imagined scenarios come about. Several important positive and negative outcomes have been linked to elements of experience (Kane et al. 2007) , behaviour (Flehmig et al. 2007) and neural functioning (Smith et al. 2015) that are independent of environmental input; nevertheless, the real-world significance of the different aspects of the cognition that we generate in our idle moments remains largely unexplored. One adaptive value we might derive from the capacity to self-generate thought unrelated to the task in hand is the chance to make progress on problems that we cannot act on immediately. As a species, we devote a substantial amount of our free time to thinking about the future: experience-sampling studies have identified a prospective bias in naturally occurring thoughts across many different cultures (Baird et al. 2011; Stawarczyk et al. 2011; Song and Wang 2012; Ruby et al. 2013) . Although these studies show that future-oriented thought is common during the mindwandering state, they do not explain whether this leads to more effective plans and if so what mechanism underlies this change. It is possible that prospective thoughts could help refine strategies for achieving personal goals, a process that would be adaptive if it allowed future actions to be specified in greater detail (Gollwitzer and Sheeran 2006). Prior work has shown inconsistent evidence that tasks that encourage stimulus-independent thought increase the chance that a novel solution to an old problem will be generated through a process of incubation (Baird et al. 2012; Smeekens and Kane 2016) ; however, as incubation is assumed to be largely unconscious (Smith and Blankenship 1991) , this does not explain the benefits we may gain from devoting conscious thought to a problem. The current experiment examined the hypothesis that future-focussed thought during mind-wandering helps us generate the steps we should take to achieve important personal goals. We also hoped to understand the structure of spontaneous neurocognitive activity that underpins the process through which people make plans for the future. The medial temporal lobe system, and in particular the hippocampus, is a plausible candidate neural system for allowing us to form more concrete plans for the future. Lesion studies and functional imaging work have documented that the hippocampus is important in forming new memories with high levels of episodic detail (Eichenbaum 1993; Aggleton and Brown 1999) , as well as the retrieval of these memories in the service of constructing imagined scenes (for reviews, se (...truncated)


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Barbara Medea, Theodoros Karapanagiotidis, Mahiko Konishi. How do we decide what to do? Resting-state connectivity patterns and components of self-generated thought linked to the development of more concrete personal goals, Experimental Brain Research, 2018, pp. 1-13, DOI: 10.1007/s00221-016-4729-y