According to researchers at Boston College and the University of Albany, SUNY, the underlying process at work is referred to as episodic simulation, essentially the ability to re-organize memories from the past into a newly imagined event simulated in the mind.
New research shows that when we see people in trouble, we imagine how we can help before we act.
Researchers said neuroimaging helped them identify multiple neural pathways that explain the relationship between imagination and the willingness to help others.
The team explored two separate brain regions with different functions: The right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), a brain region thought to be involved in representing the minds of other people, also known as “perspective-taking,” and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) subsystem, a set of brain regions that support the simulation of imagined scenes.
The study discovered evidence for the direct impact of scene imagery on willingness to help, according to Boston College Associate Professor of Psychology Liane Young, a co-author and the principal investigator on the project.
While study participants imagined helping scenes, neural activity in the MTL predicted overall willingness to help the person in need, according to researchers.
“If we are able to vividly imagine helping someone, then we think we’re more likely to actually do it,” said Young, director of the Morality Lab at BC. “Imagining the scenery surrounding the situation can also prompt people to take the perspective of the people in the situation who need help, which in turn prompts prosocial action.”
This may be because of a phenomenon known as imagination inflation, where humans use the vividness of their imagination as a kind of cue to estimate the likelihood of an event, according to the researchers.
The research team set out to learn how the capacity to simulate imagined and remembered scenes of helping motivate individuals to form more altruistic intentions. The goal was to uncover the cognitive and neural mechanisms that explain the relationship between episodic simulation and the enhanced willingness to help those in need.
In the first experiment, which allowed the team to look at both brain regions, the researchers collected functional brain images as people imagined and remembered helping others in hypothetical scenarios.
In the second experiment, while people were imagining helping another person, the team used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt activity in their right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), a brain region thought to be involved in representing the minds of other people.
Neuroimaging revealed that the willingness to help was also predicted by activity in the RTPJ, a critical node that’s involved in taking the perspective of other people, according to the researchers. However, in the second experiment, when the team used TMS to temporarily inhibit activity in the RTPJ, they found that the altruistic effect of vividly imagining helping remained significant, suggesting that this effect doesn’t depend exclusively on perspective-taking.
“We had initially expected that higher neural activity in the medial temporal lobe subsystem would be associated with a greater willingness to help,” the researchers reported. “Surprisingly, we found the opposite: The more activity a person had in their MTL subsystem while they were imagining helping scenes, the less willing they were to help the person in need.”
This contradiction may be explained by lower MTL activity reflecting greater ease of imagining episodes, and that ease of imagination means that participants are more willing to help. Consistent with this account, the team found that when participants reported finding it easier to imagine or remember helping episodes, they also tended to report being more willing to help the person in need.
Next steps in the research will further connect the lab’s neuroimaging approach with measures of real-world altruistic behavior, according to the researchers.
