The neural architecture of first-person moral choice: A demand-dependent working model.

Abstract

First-person moral choice may require the coordination of norm-relevant, self-relevant, affective, and outcome-related information. This narrative review integrates neuroimaging and electrophysiological evidence into a network-informed temporal working model organized around integrative demand: the extent to which multiple, potentially competing constraints must be represented and coordinated. The model distinguishes four candidate functional contributions: salience-related orienting, posterior default-mode/medial-temporal self-relevant situation construction, executive-control/frontoparietal comparison when competing rules, anticipated consequences, or response options must be actively maintained, and ventromedial-prefrontal value integration. Rather than forming a fixed cascade, these contributions may overlap, recur, and interact dynamically, with their relative involvement depending on task structure and integrative demand. Neuroimaging findings document task-dependent regional effects and, in a small number of studies, network interactions, while event-related potentials and oscillatory dynamics constrain the timing of salience-sensitive, conflict-sensitive, mnemonic, evaluative, and response-related processes. Together, these findings motivate a temporally structured but flexible account in which first-person moral choice emerges from changing coordination among domain-general processes rather than from a dedicated moral network or universal sequence. The model generates testable predictions for paradigms that manipulate integrative demand while controlling arousal, difficulty, and response requirements, and that combine event-specific electrophysiology with anatomically constrained connectivity measures. Together, these predictions provide a path toward testing how distributed neural dynamics contribute to first-person moral choice.