Summary: Researchers have discovered how the brain prioritizes immediate and distant goals. Their study found that the hippocampus processes urgent goals faster and differently than future goals.
These findings could help understand psychiatric disorders such as depression that impair the ability to set goals. The results reveal crucial differences in brain activity and behavior related to goal prioritization.
Important facts:
- Hippocampal activity: Immediate goals activate the posterior hippocampus, while future goals engage the frontal area.
- Response times: Targets that can be reached immediately are recognized more quickly than those that are far away.
- Impact on disruption: Findings could contribute to 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 at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Icahn School of Medicine in New York have investigated how our brain remembers and adapts the goals we set for ourselves every day.
Their study shows differences in the way we process immediate and distant goals, both at the behavioral and brain levels.
These discoveries, described in the journal Nature communicationcould have significant implications for the understanding of psychiatric disorders, particularly depression, which may complicate the formulation of clear goals.
Throughout the day, we set goals that we want 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 goals, whether urgent or less urgent, are constantly redefined depending on the events that occur throughout the day.
Researchers from UNIGE and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mont Sinai Hospital in New York have studied how the brain stores and updates goals to be achieved. More specifically, how the brain figures out which goals require immediate attention and which do not.
Their study focused on a specific brain region, the hippocampus, because of its recognized role in episodic memory, which is responsible for encoding, consolidating and retrieving personally experienced information and integrating its emotional, spatial and temporal context.
An imaginary mission to Mars in the time of an MRI scan
Neuroscientists asked 31 people to imagine themselves on a fictional four-year space mission to Mars, during which they must complete a series of goals essential to survival (take care of their space helmet, exercise, eat certain foods, etc.). The mission goals varied depending on when they had to be accomplished, and there were different tasks for each of the four years of the journey.
As the mission continued, participants were presented with the same goals and were then asked to indicate whether they were past, present, or future goals.
Over time, the relevance of these goals changed: goals originally planned for the future became current needs, while current needs became past goals. In this way, participants had to manage multiple goals with different time intervals and update their priorities as their mission progressed.
Prioritizing immediate goals
The team observed each individual’s reaction times to determine whether the task was to be completed in the present, past, or future.
“Goals that must be achieved immediately are recognized more quickly than those that are to be achieved in the distant future. This different processing of stored information shows that needs in the present are given priority over needs in the distant future.”
“It takes additional time to mentally travel back in time to recall past and future goals,” explains Alison Montagrin, research associate and lecturer in the Department of Basic Neuroscience at UNIGE’s Faculty of Medicine, former postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
The scientists also investigated whether differences were also apparent at the brain level. Images obtained using very high-resolution MRI scans showed that the rear area of the hippocampus is activated when recalling information about the present. However, when remembering past goals or goals to be achieved in the future, the front area is activated.
“These results are particularly interesting because previous studies have shown that when we recall our episodic memory or our spatial memory, the front part of the hippocampus is involved in recalling general information, while the back part deals with details.”
“It will therefore be interesting to investigate whether – unlike immediate goals – projection into the future or remembering a past goal does not require specific details, but a general representation is sufficient,” the researcher concluded.
This research shows that time frame plays a crucial role in how people set personal goals. This could have important implications for understanding psychiatric disorders such as depression.
In fact, people suffering from depression may have difficulty formulating concrete goals and imagine more obstacles when trying to achieve their goals. Investigating whether these people perceive the distance to their goals differently – which could make them more pessimistic about their chances of success – could open up a therapeutic approach.
About this news from neuroscientific research
Author: Antoine Guenot
Source: University of Geneva
Contact: Antoine Guenot – University of Geneva
Picture: The image is from Neuroscience News.
Original research: Open access.
“The hippocampus separates present from past and future goals” by Alison Montagrin et al. Nature communication
Abstract
The hippocampus separates present from past and future goals
Our brain skillfully controls goals over time and distinguishes 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 long axis, moving from detailed posterior representations to generalized anterior representations.
This study examines the role of the hippocampus in discriminating goals over time: whether the hippocampus encodes time independently of detail or abstraction, and whether the hippocampus preferentially activates its anterior area for temporally distant goals (past and future) and its posterior area for immediate goals.
We use a space-based experiment with 7T functional MRI in 31 participants to investigate how the hippocampus encodes the temporal distance of targets.
During a simulated Mars mission, we find that the hippocampus tracks targets based solely on temporal proximity. We show that past and future targets activate the left anterior hippocampus, whereas current targets activate the left posterior hippocampus.
This suggests that the hippocampus maps goals using timestamps, thereby extending its longitudinal axis system to include temporal goal organization.