Journal
JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 23, Issue 4, Pages 857-866Publisher
MIT PRESS
DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2010.21479
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [BCS 0642448]
- National Center for Research Resources [P41RR14075]
- MIND Institute
- Divn Of Social and Economic Sciences
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0951695] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
People often make shortsighted decisions to receive small benefits in the present rather than large benefits in the future, that is, to favor their current selves over their future selves. In two studies using fMRI, we demonstrated that people make such decisions in part because they fail to engage in the same degree of self-referential processing when thinking about their future selves. When participants predicted how much they would enjoy an event in the future, they showed less activity in brain regions associated with introspective self-reference-such as the ventromedial pFC (vMPFC)-than when they predicted how much they would enjoy events in the present. Moreover, the magnitude of vMPFC reduction predicted the extent to which participants made shortsighted monetary decisions several weeks later. In light of recent findings that the vMPFC contributes to the ability to simulate future events from a first-person perspective, these data suggest that shortsighted decisions result in part from a failure to fully imagine the subjective experience of one's future self.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available