On Thursday 21 March, the guest speaker in the SWE Colloquium is Gökhan Aydogan from the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich.

Neural substrates of self-control: Comparing evidence from small-task-fMRI experiments and brain structure in 12,675 individuals

We face a set of choices every day – what to eat, whether to exercise, how much to spend – for which self-control is required to satisfy long-term goals. As with other executive functions, self-control is generally considered to be an effortful process that is subject to occasional failure. The associated neural substrates of self-control, which shape the ability to resist temptations, have drawn substantial attention from neuroscience, economics, psychology and related fields. However, the extent to which humans can facilitate self-control, and whether this ability is constrained by biological and genetic factors is still an open question. This talk compares evidence from two task-fMRI experiments with results from a large-scale study linking brain structure to genetic data in 12,675 individuals. Specifically, we show that frontal executive-control areas are (functionally) more engaged with increasing demand for self-control (N1 = 29, N2 = 21), and that anatomical differences of the same areas (N = 12,675) predict self-controlled behavior in the field. We also find initial evidence for genetic factors contributing to these anatomical differences that ultimately shape behavioral phenotypes.