Counterfactual thinking: an fMRI study on changing the past for a better future.

By Nicole Van Hoeck, Ning Ma, L. Ampe, Kris Baetens, Marie Vandekerckhove, F. Van Overwalle. 2013

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent studies suggest that a brain network mainly associated with episodic memory has a more general function in imagining oneself in another time, place or perspective (e.g. episodic future thought, theory of mind, default mode). If this is true, counterfactual thinking (e.g. 'If I had left the office earlier, I wouldn't have missed my train.') should also activate this network. Present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study explores the common and distinct neural activity of counterfactual and episodic thinking by directly comparing the imagining of upward counterfactuals (creating better outcomes for negative past events) with the re-experiencing of negative past events and the imagining of positive future events. Results confirm that episodic and counterfactual thinking share a common brain network, involving a core memory network (hippocampal area, temporal lobes, midline, and lateral parietal lobes) and prefrontal areas that might be related to mentalizing (medial prefrontal cortex) and performance monitoring (right prefrontal cortex). In contrast to episodic past and future thinking, counterfactual thinking recruits some of these areas more strongly and extensively, and additionally activates the bilateral inferior parietal lobe and posterior medial frontal cortex. We discuss these findings in view of recent fMRI evidence on the working of episodic memory and theory of mind.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Counterfactuals in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Evidence from Human Reasoning (2019, background): “Accordingly, counterfactuals activate brain regions associated with conflict detection [Ferguson et al., 2008; Van Hoeck et al., 2013].”
Thinking About the Opposite of What Is Said: Counterfactual Conditionals and Symbolic or Alternate Simulations of Negation (2018, background): “The counterfactual conjecture conflicts with the presupposed facts, and hence eye-tracking studies show an initial brief disruption in the immediate comprehension of a counterfactual (e.g., Ferguson & Sanford, 2008). fMRI studies also show that counterfactuals activate areas of the medial prefrontal”
REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics (2019, background): “The DMN has been associated with arguably species-defining behaviors such as mental time travel (Ostby et al., 2012), moral decision making (Kaplan et al., 2017), counter-factual thinking (Van Hoeck et al., 2013), and self-consciousness (Fingelkurts et al., 2012).”
The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain (2012, background): “…earlier (Addis et al., 2009a) indicates that many of the same regions are involved in imagining future and imagining past events, and recent fMRI evidence examining the construction of alternative outcomes to past events also implicates many regions in the default network (Van Hoeck et al., 2012).”
Navigating Into the Future or Driven by the Past (2013, background): “…speech, and in fact M. C. Fox, Ericsson, and Best (2011) showed that having people voice their thoughts as they perform a task usually has little or no effect on performance, which suggests that talking does not constitute much extra mental load over and above thinking one’s way through the task.”