Previous evidence suggests a link between pro-environmental decisions and prosociality, but it remains unknown whether pro-environmental and prosocial decisions rely also on common neural mechanisms. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the neural correlates of pro-environmental decisions overlap with brain regions involved in prosociality, including the TPJ. To test this hypothesis, we used fMRI on 35 healthy participants performing pro-environmental and prosocial decision tasks as well as a control task for future-oriented decisions. As expected, pro-environmental and prosocial decision-making showed overlapping neural activation in regions belonging to the mentalizing network, including the TPJ. In addition, the TPJ moderated the attitude–behavior gap: Increasing TPJ activation was associated with lower attitude–behavior gaps. Taken together, our findings provide insight into the neurocognitive processes of pro-environmental decision-making by suggesting that pro-environmental decisions share neural correlates with prosocial decisions and by elucidating the role of the TPJ in the attitude–behavior gap.

Dual tasks are characterized by the requirement for additional task-order coordination processes that schedule the processing order of two temporally overlapping tasks. Preliminary evidence from functional imaging studies suggests that lateral pFC (lPFC) activation correlates with implementing these task-order coordination processes. However, so far, it is unclear whether the lPFC is also causally involved in coordinating task order during dual-task performance and which exact mechanisms are implemented by this brain region. In this study, we addressed these open issues by applying online TMS during a dual-task situation. For this purpose, participants performed a dual task in fixed-order blocks with a constant order of tasks and in random-order block, in which the order of tasks varied randomly and thus demands on task-order coordination were increased. In Experiment 1, TMS of the lPFC compared with control TMS conditions impaired dual-task performance in random-order blocks, whereas performance in fixed-order blocks was unaffected by TMS. In Experiment 2, we tested for the specificity of the lPFC TMS effect on task-order coordination by applying TMS over the preSMA. We showed that preSMA TMS did not affect dual-task performance, neither in fixed-order nor in random-order blocks. Results of this study indicate that the lPFC, but not the preSMA, is causally involved in implementing task-order coordination processes in dual-task situations.

Previous studies suggest that both motivation and task difficulty expectations activate brain regions associated with cognitive control. However, it remains an open question whether motivational and cognitive determinants of control have similar or dissociable impacts on conflict processing on a neural level. The current study tested the effects of motivation and conflict expectancy on activity in regions related to processing of the target and the distractor information. Participants performed a picture–word interference task in which we manipulated the size of performance-dependent monetary rewards (level of motivation) and the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials within a block (level of conflict expectancy). Our results suggest that motivation improves conflict processing by facilitating task-relevant stimulus processing and task difficulty expectations mainly modulate the processing of distractor information. We conclude that motivation and conflict expectancy engage dissociable control strategies during conflict resolution.