No abstract

The ability to envision specific future episodes is a ubiquitous mental phenomenon that has seldom been discussed in the neuroscience literature. In this study, subjects underwent functional MRI while using event cues (e.g., Birthday) as a guide to vividly envision a personal future event, remember a personal memory, or imagine an event involving a familiar individual. Two basic patterns of data emerged. One set of regions (e.g., within left lateral premotor cortex; left precuneus; right posterior cerebellum) was more active while envisioning the future than while recollecting the past (and more active in both of these conditions than in the task involving imagining another person). These regions appear similar to those emerging from the literature on imagined (simulated) bodily movements. A second set of regions (e.g., bilateral posterior cingulate; bilateral parahippocampal gyrus; left occipital cortex) demonstrated indistinguishable activity during the future and past tasks (but greater activity in both tasks than the imagery control task); similar regions have been shown to be important for remembering previously encountered visual-spatial contexts. Hence, differences between the future and past tasks are attributed to differences in the demands placed on regions that underlie motor imagery of bodily movements, and similarities in activity for these two tasks are attributed to the reactivation of previously experienced visual-spatial contexts. That is, subjects appear to place their future scenarios in well known visual-spatial contexts. Our results offer insight into the fundamental and little-studied capacity of vivid mental projection of oneself in the future.autonoetic consciousness ͉ episodic future thought ͉ episodic memory ͉ functional MRI

o understand how the mind works, one must understand associative processing. This idea is as old as Aristotle's first theories of mind, in which he speculated T about the factors that create mental associations (contiguity, similarity, contrast).Succeeding generations of scholars and researchers have repeatedly affirmed, both in their theories and in experimental research, that the mind is an exquisitely tuned device for holding associative information. This theme permeates modem cognitive psychology. Activation of a concept in episodic or semantic memory is believed to spread among neighboring concepts, partially arousing them, and thereby influencing mental life.The associative effect of one concept on another has been studied in many paradigms in cognitive psychology. For example, in a standard semantic priming paradigm (e.g., Neely, 1977Neely, , 1991; see also Neely & Kahan, chapter 5 , this volume), the speed of deciding that a letter string (doctor) is a word is increased if it has been preceded by an associatively related word (nurse) relative to an unrelated word (house). The basic explanation is that activation of nurse spreads through an associative-semantic network, thereby partially activating the related word doctor so that it can be identified faster. Similarly, in the false-recognition paradigm used by Underwood (1965), the presence of a word such as table in a list increased false recognition of a related word such as chair, relative to unrelated concepts such as screen. A straightforward interpretation of this finding is that presentation of the word table may have aroused an implicit associative response, as Underwood called it. to chair when table was encoded. When chair later was presented for a recognition This research was supported by a contract from the Office of Technical Services of the U.S.

The present study examined the relationship between personality and individual differences in multi-tasking ability. Participants enrolled at the University of Utah completed measures of multi-tasking activity, perceived multi-tasking ability, impulsivity, and sensation seeking. In addition, they performed the Operation Span in order to assess their executive control and actual multi-tasking ability. The findings indicate that the persons who are most capable of multi-tasking effectively are not the persons who are most likely to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously. To the contrary, multi-tasking activity as measured by the Media Multitasking Inventory and self-reported cell phone usage while driving were negatively correlated with actual multi-tasking ability. Multi-tasking was positively correlated with participants’ perceived ability to multi-task ability which was found to be significantly inflated. Participants with a strong approach orientation and a weak avoidance orientation – high levels of impulsivity and sensation seeking – reported greater multi-tasking behavior. Finally, the findings suggest that people often engage in multi-tasking because they are less able to block out distractions and focus on a singular task. Participants with less executive control - low scorers on the Operation Span task and persons high in impulsivity - tended to report higher levels of multi-tasking activity.

Previous neuroimaging studies have implicated the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and nearby brain regions in deception. This is consistent with the hypothesis that lying involves the executive control system. To date, the nature of the contribution of different aspects of executive control to deception, however, remains unclear. In the present study, we utilized an activation likelihood estimate (ALE) method of meta-analysis to quantitatively identify brain regions that are consistently more active for deceptive responses relative to truthful responses across past studies. We then contrasted the results with additional ALE maps generated for 3 different aspects of executive control: working memory, inhibitory control, and task switching. Deception-related regions in dorsolateral PFC and posterior parietal cortex were selectively associated with working memory. Additional deception regions in ventrolateral PFC, anterior insula, and anterior cingulate cortex were associated with multiple aspects of executive control. In contrast, deception-related regions in bilateral inferior parietal lobule were not associated with any of the 3 executive control constructs. Our findings support the notion that executive control processes, particularly working memory, and their associated neural substrates play an integral role in deception. This work provides a foundation for future research on the neurocognitive basis of deception.