Abstract
Self-generated cognitions, such as recalling personal memories or empathizing with others, are ubiquitous and essential for our lives. Such internal mental processing is ascribed to the default mode network - a large network of the human brain - although the underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we tested the hypothesis that our mental experience is mediated by a combination of activities of multiple cognitive processes. Our study included four functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments with the same participants and a wide range of cognitive tasks, as well as an analytical approach that afforded the identification of cognitive processes during self-generated cognition. We showed that several cognitive processes functioned simultaneously during self-generated mental activity. The processes had specific and localized neural representations, suggesting that they support different aspects of internal processing. Overall, we demonstrate that internally directed experience may be achieved by pooling over multiple cognitive processes.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 896-910 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Nature Human Behaviour |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 4 Dec 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017 The Author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by the Yad Hanadiv Rothschild fellowship (to V.A.), the Wellcome Trust (to G.R.) and the Israeli Center of Research Excellence in Cognitive Sciences (to M.B.). We also thank K. Siuda-Krzywicka and S. Schwarzkopf for advice, and N. Hale for technical assistance. No funders had any role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Funders | Funder number |
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Israeli Center of Research Excellence in Cognitive Sciences | |
Yad Hanadiv Rothschild | |
Wellcome Trust |