Predicting Real-Life Self-Control From Brain Activity Encoding the Value of Anticipated Future Outcomes

Abstract

Deficient self-control leads to shortsighted decisions and incurs severe personal and societal costs. Although neuroimaging has advanced our understanding of neural mechanisms underlying self-control, the ecological validity of laboratory tasks used to assess self-control remains largely unknown. To increase ecological validity and to test a specific hypothesis about the mechanisms underlying real-life self-control, we combined functional MRI during value-based decision-making with smartphone-based assessment of real-life self-control in a large community sample ( N = 194). Results showed that an increased propensity to make shortsighted decisions and commit self-control failures, both in the laboratory task as well as during real-life conflicts, was associated with a reduced modulation of neural value signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to anticipated long-term consequences. These results constitute the first evidence that neural mechanisms mediating anticipations of future consequences not only account for self-control in laboratory tasks but also predict real-life self-control, thereby bridging the gap between laboratory research and real-life behavior.

Chronic stress, executive functioning, and real‐life self‐control: An experience sampling study

“…In accordance with this idea, higher error-related brain activity in the salience network has been found to predict lower rates of desire enactment in real-life self-control situations (Krönke et al, 2018). Increased salience detection and performance-monitoring may cause stronger recruitment of cognitive control networks, which in turn leads to increased top-down modulation of neural value signals by long-term goals and, thus, less impact of immediate desires on behavioral choices (Krönke et al, 2020). Together with converging evidence that acute stress is associated with activation of the salience network, but not always with changes in the control network (Van Oort et al, 2017), our present findings are consistent with the idea that chronic stress does not primarily impair inhibitory selfcontrol processes during acute conflicts, but rather increases the impact of immediate relative to anticipated desires on behavioral choices.…”

The Error-Related Negativity Predicts Self-Control Failures in Daily Life

“…As mentioned above, it would also be of interest to examine the connection between PM and the actual neural implementation of self-control and how that in turn relates to goal-directed behavior in daily life. It has been suggested that the exertion of self-control is implemented via the top-down-modulation of task-relevant perceptual representations in conflict tasks (e.g., the Stroop task) (Kerns et al, 2004;Krönke et al, 2018) and of value representations in choice conflict tasks (Hare et al, 2009;Krönke et al, 2020) by goal representations maintained in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Moreover, such top-down modulations have been shown to predict real-life self-control.…”

Impulsive decision-making predicts the course of substance-related and addictive disorders

“…Data were collected as part of a prospective-longitudinal community study within a Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 940) at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. At baseline, participants took part in four different test sessions including a clinical assessment, a behavioural task battery, an fMRI session, and experience sampling for daily self-control failures (for further results, see Krönke et al 2018;Krönke et al 2020;Wolff et al 2016). The 1-year follow-up included only a clinical assessment.…”