Journal
SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 4, Issue 5, Pages 412-425Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/17470910902750186
Keywords
Self; fMRI; Goals; Time
Categories
Funding
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
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Effective self-regulation requires the ability to consider alternate goal states in order to adapt to shifting circumstances. Previous research on goal reflection has identified goal-type dissociations in brain regions broadly associated with self-projection. Importantly, however, there is a need to distinguish activation differences due to recruitment of distinct processes from activations that reflect common processes with varying levels of recruitment. The fact that different types of goals tend to covary naturally with time allowed us to vary the difficulty of goal reflection across content domains. Participants in an fMRI study thought about promotion or prevention goals at three time points. Goals that varied in terms of content, time-frame, valence, and abstractness but were difficult to construct (relative to other goals) activated an area of dorsal medial PFC, suggesting that this region may support general-purpose projective processes. In contrast, goals that were easy to construct activated a region of dorsolateral PFC involved in domain-general memory retrieval. Importantly, we also observed domain-specific effects of goal type and temporal distance; promotion goals were associated with heightened activity in medial PFC, short-term goals activated precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex, and longer-term goals activated frontal areas, including ventrolateral PFC and orbitofrontal cortex.
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