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)