ABSTRACT

Affective future thinking allows us to prepare for future outcomes, but we know little about neural representation of emotional future simulations. We used a multi-voxel pattern analysis to determine whether patterns of neural activity can reliably distinguish between positive and negative future simulations. Neural patterning in the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortices distinguished positive from negative future simulations, indicating that these regions code for the emotional valence of future events. These results support prior findings that anterior medial regions contain representations of emotions across various stimuli, and contribute to identifying potential rewarding outcomes of future events. More broadly, these results demonstrate that the phenomenological features of future thinking can be decoded using neural activity.

摘要

情感未来思维使我们能够为未来的结果做好准备，但我们对情感未来模拟的神经表征知之甚少。我们使用多体素模式分析来确定神经活动模式是否能够可靠地区分正面和负面的未来模拟。前扣带回和腹内侧前额叶皮层的神经模式区分了积极和消极的未来模拟，表明这些区域编码了未来事件的情绪效价。这些结果支持先前的发现，即前内侧区域包含各种刺激的情绪表征，并有助于识别未来事件的潜在奖励结果。更广泛地，