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Despite increased longevity, many people fail to save the funds necessary to support their retirement. In an attempt both to elucidate and remedy this failing, research exploring the “future-self continuity” hypothesis has revealed that temporal discounting is decreased and saving increased when connections between one’s current and future self are strengthened. Here, we explored the possibility that a basic component of mental imagery – spatial visual perspective – may be an important determinant of people’s decisions to spend now or save for the future. The results of two experiments supported this prediction. Rates of saving were enhanced when a distant-future event was generated from a third-person vs. first-person vantage point, an effect that was mediated by visual bodily awareness during mental imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the experience and context dependence of patterns of ongoing thought. These studies reveal that systems linked to attention and control are important for organizing experience in response to changing environmental demands. These studies also establish a role of the default mode network beyond task-negative or purely episodic content, for example, implicating it in the level of vivid detail in experience in both task contexts and in spontaneous self-generated experiential states. Together, this work demonstrates that the landscape of ongoing thought is reflected in the activity of multiple neural systems, and it is important to distinguish between processes contributing to how the experience unfolds from those linked to how these experiences are regulated., (© 2021 The Authors.)

Autism symptomology has a profound impact on cognitive and affective functioning, yet we know relatively little about how it shapes patterns of ongoing thought. In an exploratory study in a large population of neurotypical individuals, we used experience sampling to characterise the relationship between ongoing cognition and self-reported autistic traits. We found that with increasing autistic symptom score, cognition was characterised by thinking more in words than images. Analysis of structural neuroimaging data found that autistic traits linked to social interaction were associated with greater cortical thickness in a region of lingual gyrus (LG) within the occipital cortex. Analysis of resting state functional neuroimaging data found autistic traits were associated with stronger connectivity between the LG and a region of motor cortex. Importantly, the strength of connectivity between the LG and motor cortex moderated the link between autistic symptoms and thinking in words: individuals showing higher connectivity showed a stronger association between autistic traits and thinking in words. Together we provide behavioural and neural evidence linking autistic traits to the tendency to think in words which may be rooted in underlying cortical organisation. These observations lay the groundwork for research into the form and content of self-generated thoughts in individuals with the established diagnosis of autism., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Recent research has revealed a pervasive bias for self-relevant information during decision-making, a phenomenon termed the self-prioritization effect. Focusing almost exclusively on between-target (e.g., self vs. friend) differences in task performance, however, this work has overlooked the influence stimulus factors potentially exert during decisional processing. Accordingly, based on pertinent social-psychological theorizing (i.e., Identity-Based Motivation Theory), here we explored the possibility that self-prioritization is sensitive to the identity-based relevance of stimuli. The results of three experiments supported this hypothesis. In a perceptual-matching task, stimulus enhancement was greatest when geometric shapes were associated with identity-related information that was important (vs. unimportant) to participants. In addition, hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling revealed this effect was underpinned by differences in the efficiency of visual processing. Specifically, evidence was extracted more rapidly from stimuli paired with consequential compared to inconsequential identity-related components. These findings demonstrate how identity-relevance moderates self-prioritization., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Alexithymia has been frequently associated with major depression disorders (MDD). Yet little is known about the exact relationship of alexithymia and MDD. In order to explore this subject matter, the neural connectivity associated with alexithymia in people with MDD and matched nonclinical controls were compared., Methods: Twenty-two females diagnosed with first-episode MDD and twenty-one matched nonclinical controls were MRI brain-scanned with diffusion-tensor-imaging and resting-state-functional-imaging methods, and self-reported the Chinese 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale., Results: Voxel-wise multiple regression analysis showed a group interaction effect regarding the correlation between white-matter-connectivity and alexithymia. Significant correlations were observed at the corpus-callosum in MDDs and at the right superior-longitudinal-fasciculus in the controls. These findings were then used to derive seeds for analyzing resting-state-functional-connectivity in each group separately. The results further revealed that alexithymia in MDDs were associated with reduced functional-connectivity in the right precentral-gyrus and several regions of the brain on the right which are associated with cognitive regulation in the default-mode-network. In contrast, among the control subjects, alexithymia was correlated with increased functional-connectivity between the right inferior-frontal-gyrus-triangularis and the right superior-occipital-lobe, which is associated with emotional response to external stimuli., Limitations: Better participant selection, especially recruitment of medication-free samples, and the engagement of additional alexithymia assessments, should be considered in future investigations., Conclusions: These findings supported our a priori hypothesis that MDDs and controls have distinct white-matter correlates of alexithymia, and these corresponded to the existing proposed neural correlates for the cognitive and affective characteristics of alexithymia respectively. Extended impacts of these microstructural changes on remote functional networks might help explain the distinct behavioral characteristics of alexithymia for these groups, as well as implications for therapeutic intervention of MDD., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)