Beyond impulse control – toward a comprehensive neural account of future-oriented decision making

The dominant focus of current neural models of future-oriented decision making is on the interplay between the brain’s reward system and a frontoparietal network thought to implement impulse control. Here, we propose a re-interpretation of the contribution of frontoparietal activation to future-oriented behavior and argue that future-oriented decisions are influenced by a variety of psychological mechanisms implemented by dissociable brain mechanisms. We review the literature on the neural mechanisms underlying the influence of prospection, retrospection, framing, metacognition, and automatization on future-oriented decisions. We propose that the prefrontal cortex contributes to future-oriented decisions not by exerting impulse control but by constructing and updating the value of abstract future rewards. These prefrontal value representations interact with regions involved in reward processing (neural reward system), prospection (hippocampus, temporal cortex), metacognition (frontopolar cortex), and habitual behavior (dorsal striatum). The proposed account of the brain mechanisms underlying future-oriented decisions has several implications for both basic and clinical research: First, by reconciling the idea of frontoparietal control processes with construal accounts of intertemporal choice, we offer an alternative interpretation of the canonical prefrontal activation during future-oriented decisions. Second, we highlight the need for obtaining a better understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying future-oriented decisions beyond impulse control and of their contribution to myopic decisions in clinical disorders. Such a widened focus may, third, stimulate the development of novel neural interventions for the treatment of pathological impulsive decision making.