Summary: Researchers have discovered how the brain prioritizes immediate and distant goals. Their study found that the hippocampus processes urgent goals more quickly and differently than future goals.
This information could help understand psychiatric disorders like depression, which affect goal-setting abilities. The results reveal crucial differences in brain activity and behavior related to goal prioritization.
Highlights:
- Hippocampal activity: Immediate goals activate the posterior hippocampus, while future goals engage the anterior region.
- Reaction time: Goals to be achieved immediately are recognized more quickly than distant goals.
- Implications for disorders: Information could facilitate the understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders such as depression.
Source: University of Geneva
How does our brain distinguish between urgent and less urgent goals?
Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Icahn School of Medicine in New York have explored how our brain memorizes and adjusts the goals we set for ourselves on a daily basis.
Their study reveals differences in how we process immediate and distant goals, both at the behavioral and cerebral levels.
These findings, described in the journal Natural communicationscould have significant implications in understanding psychiatric disorders, particularly depression, which may hinder the formulation of clear goals.
Throughout the day, we set goals to achieve: pick up the kids from school in an hour, make dinner in three hours, make a doctor’s appointment in five days, or mow the lawn in a week . These objectives, urgent or less urgent, are constantly redefined according to events that occur throughout the day.
Researchers from UNIGE and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York studied how the brain memorizes and updates goals to achieve. Specifically, how the brain determines which goals require immediate attention and which do not.
Their study focused on a particular region of the brain, the hippocampus, due to its established role in episodic memory. This is responsible for the encoding, consolidation and recovery of personally experienced information, integrating its emotional, spatial and temporal context.
An imaginary mission to Mars, time for an MRI
Neuroscientists asked 31 people to imagine themselves on an imaginary 4-year space mission to Mars, asking them to achieve a series of goals crucial to their survival (taking care of their space helmet, exercising, eating certain foods, etc.). The mission objectives varied depending on when they were to be achieved, with different tasks for each of the four years of the journey.
As participants progressed through the mission, they were presented with the same goals. They were then asked to indicate whether they were past, present, or future goals.
As participants moved forward in time, the relevance of these goals changed: goals initially planned for the future became current needs, while current needs became past goals. Thus, participants had to manage several objectives at different distances in time and update their priorities as their mission progressed.
Prioritize immediate goals
The team observed each individual’s reaction times to determine whether the task should be completed in the present, past or future.
“Goals to be achieved immediately are recognized more quickly than those to be achieved in the distant future. This different treatment of stored information reveals the priority given to the needs of the present over those of the distant future.
“It takes more time to mentally travel in time to find one’s past and future goals,” explains Alison Montagrin, researcher and teacher in the Department of Fundamental Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, former postdoctoral student at the Icahn School. . of Medicine and first author of the study.
The scientists also investigated whether differences were also apparent at the brain level. Images obtained by very high resolution MRI revealed that, when retrieving information about the present, the hippocampus is activated in its posterior region. On the other hand, when recalling past goals or goals to be achieved in the future, the anterior region is activated.
“These results are particularly interesting because previous studies have shown that when we use our episodic memory or our spatial memory, the anterior region of the hippocampus is involved in the retrieval of general information, while the posterior part is takes care of the details.”
“It will therefore be interesting to explore whether, unlike immediate goals, projecting into the future or recalling a past goal does not require precise details, but a general representation is sufficient,” concludes the researcher.
This research shows that time scale plays a crucial role in how people set personal goals. This could have important implications for understanding psychiatric disorders such as depression.
Indeed, people suffering from depression may have difficulty setting specific goals and may consider more obstacles to achieving their goals. Studying whether these people perceive the distance that separates them from their goals differently – which could make them pessimistic about their chances of success – could open a therapeutic avenue.
About this neuroscience research news
Author: Antoine Guenot
Source: University of Geneva
Contact: Antoine Guénot – University of Geneva
Picture: Image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Free access.
“The hippocampus dissociates the present from past and future goals” by Alison Montagrin et al. Natural communications
Abstract
The hippocampus dissociates the present from past and future goals
Our brains skillfully navigate between goals over time, distinguishing between urgent needs and those of the past or future.
The hippocampus is a region known to support mental time travel and organize information along its longitudinal axis, moving from detailed posterior representations to generalized anterior representations.
This study examines the role of the hippocampus in goal discrimination over time: whether the hippocampus encodes time independently of detail or abstraction, and whether the hippocampus preferentially activates its anterior region for temporally distant goals (past and future) and its posterior region for immediate objectives. .
We use a space-themed experiment with 7T functional MRI on 31 participants to examine how the hippocampus encodes the temporal distance of goals.
During a simulated mission to Mars, we find that the hippocampus tracks targets only by temporal proximity. We show that past and future goals activate the left anterior hippocampus, while current goals engage the left posterior hippocampus.
This suggests that the hippocampus maps goals using timestamps, thereby extending its long axis system to include the temporal organization of goals.