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July 02, 2019 Tuesday 01:11:37 PM IST

Imagination impacts attitudes

Sometimes in life there are special places that seem to stand out to us. It's as if the special experience with a beloved person transferred positive emotion to the location. Our attitude towards these places thus suddenly changes - they become valuable to us. But could this also happen purely by the power of imagination rather than by actual experiences?

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Harvard University have examined the question in a study published in the journal Nature Communications. They show that our attitudes can be influenced not only by what we actually experience but also by what we imagine,a phenomenon based on activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Researchers tried to understand the human ability to experience hypothetical events through imagination and how we learn from imagined events much in the same way as from actual experiences.Research further aims to understand the consequences of negative thoughts and its influences on people.