Deficient self-control leads to shortsighted decisions and incurs severe personal and societal costs. Although neuroimaging has advanced our understanding of neural mechanisms underlying self-control, the ecological validity of laboratory tasks used to assess self-control remains largely unknown. To increase ecological validity and to test a specific hypothesis about the mechanisms underlying real-life self-control, we combined functional MRI during value-based decision-making with smartphone-based assessment of real-life self-control in a large community sample (N = 194). Results showed that an increased propensity to make shortsighted decisions and commit self-control failures, both in the laboratory task as well as during real-life conflicts, was associated with a reduced modulation of neural value signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to anticipated long-term consequences. These results constitute the first evidence that neural mechanisms mediating anticipations of future consequences not only account for self-control in laboratory tasks but also predict real-life self-control, thereby bridging the gap between laboratory research and real-life behavior.

中文翻译：

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从编码预期未来结果的价值的大脑活动预测现实生活中的自我控制

缺乏自我控制会导致短视的决定，并导致严重的个人和社会成本。尽管神经影像学促进了我们对自我控制的神经机制的理解，但用于评估自我控制的实验室任务的生态有效性在很大程度上仍然未知。为了提高生态有效性并测试关于现实生活中自我控制机制的特定假设，我们将基于价值的决策过程中的功能 MRI 与基于智能手机的大型社区样本中的现实生活自我控制评估相结合。 N = 194）。结果表明，无论是在实验室任务中还是在现实生活中的冲突中，更倾向于做出短视的决定和自我控制失败，与腹内侧前额叶皮层中神经值信号的调制减少有关，以响应预期的长期后果。这些结果构成了第一个证据，表明调节未来后果预期的神经机制不仅可以解释实验室任务中的自我控制，还可以预测现实生活中的自我控制，从而弥合实验室研究与现实生活行为之间的差距。