Goal-Dependent Hippocampal Representations Facilitate Self-Control

Mnemonic influences on decision-making processes are important for linking past experiences and simulations of the future with current goals. The ways in which mnemonic information is represented may be especially critical in situations where one needs to overcome past rewarding experiences and exert self-control. We propose that self-control success or failure may depend on how information is retrieved from memory and how effectively this memory retrieval process can be modified to achieve a specific goal. We test our hypothesis using representational similarity analyses of human neuroimaging data during a dietary self-control task in which individuals must overcome taste temptations to choose healthy foods. We find that self-control is indeed associated with the way individuals represent taste information in the brain and how taste representations adapt to align with different goals. These results provide new insights into the processes leading to self-control success and indicate the need to update the classical view of self-control to continue to advance our understanding of its behavioral and neural underpinnings.