Embodied Mental Rotation – Does It Affect Postural Stability?

Current Psychology, 2021

Tetris is not only a widely used entertaining computer game, but has been used as a component in emerging psychological interventions targeting dysfunctional mental imagery, e.g., intrusive memories and imagery-based cravings. However, little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these interventions. Tetris gameplay has been hypothesized to disrupt dysfunctional mental imagery (e.g., imagery-based intrusive memories of adverse events) and cravings (e.g., substance use) by taxing visuospatial working memory. In line with this, the present study aimed to characterize brain areas involved in the visuospatial aspects of Tetris gameplay, by controlling for motor activity (button presses) and using gameplay instructions emphasizing mental rotation. Participants (N = 28) received mental rotation instructions and thereafter either played Tetris, or only pressed buttons as if playing Tetris (motor activity), while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Tetris ga...

Brain Imaging and Behavior

Motor imagery (MI) has been considered effective in learning and practicing movements in many fields. However, when evaluating the effectiveness of this technique, the examiner has no way of assessing the participant's motor imagery process. As an alternative, we have been exploring a mental body-part rotation task, in which the examiner can estimate the participant's motivation and ability to sustain attention through the scored results. In this study, we aimed to investigate the possible application of a mental rotation (MRot) task and used fMRI to compare the brain activity during the MRot task with that during an MI task in healthy volunteers. Increased blood oxygenation level-dependent signals were observed bilaterally in the premotor areas and supplementary motor area during performance of both MI and MRot tasks. Our findings suggest that MRot could be an alternative to MI.

In the present study we applied online transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) bursts at 10 Hz to the supplementary motor area (SMA) and primary motor cortex to test whether these regions are causally involved in mental rotation. Furthermore, in order to investigate what is the specific role played by SMA and primary motor cortex, two mental rotation tasks were used, which included pictures of hands and abstract objects, respectively.

NeuroImage, 2006

Functional MRI during performance of a validated mental rotation task was used to assess a neurobiological basis for sex differences in visuospatial processing. Between-sex group analysis demonstrated greater activity in women than in men in dorsalmedial prefrontal and other high-order heteromodal association cortices, suggesting women performed mental rotation in an effortful, ''top-down'' fashion. In contrast, men activated primary sensory cortices as well as regions involved in implicit learning (basal ganglia) and mental imagery (precuneus), consistent with a more automatic, ''bottomup'' strategy. Functional connectivity analysis in association with a measure of behavioral performance showed that, in men (but not women), accurate performance was associated with deactivation of parieto-insular vestibular cortex (PIVC) as part of a visualvestibular network. Automatic evocation by men to a greater extent than women of this network during mental rotation may represent an effective, unconscious, bottom-up neural strategy which could reasonably account for men's traditional visuospatial performance advantage.

Neuropsychologia, 2011

Whether mental visual images play a functional role in cognition or that propositional knowledge is sufficient for supporting performance in imagery tasks is a long-standing debate. It cannot be resolved using behavioural data alone, nor by brain imaging data alone; for example, across fMRI studies mental rotation has been shown to involve virtually all areas of the brain. Alternatively participants might adopt different cognitive strategies. We report behavioural and fMRI data for mental rotation from individuals reporting vivid or poor mental imagery. Groups differed in errors but not response times, and differed in brain activation patterns, suggesting that the groups performed the same task in different ways.

Scientific Reports, 2016

Sensorimotor processing specifically impacts mental body representations. In particular, deteriorated somatosensory input (as after complete spinal cord injury) increases the relative weight of visual aspects of body parts' representations, leading to aberrancies in how images of body parts are mentally manipulated (e.g. mental rotation). This suggests that a sensorimotor or visual reference frame, respectively, can be relatively dominant in local (hands) versus global (full-body) bodily representations. On this basis, we hypothesized that the recruitment of a specific reference frame could be reflected in the activation of sensorimotor versus visual brain networks. To this aim, we directly compared the brain activity associated with mental rotation of hands versus full-bodies. Mental rotation of hands recruited more strongly the supplementary motor area, premotor cortex, and secondary somatosensory cortex. Conversely, mental rotation of full-bodies determined stronger activity in temporo-occipital regions, including the functionally-localized extrastriate body area. These results support that (1) sensorimotor and visual frames of reference are used to represent the body, (2) two distinct brain networks encode local or global bodily representations, and (3) the extrastriate body area is a multimodal region involved in body processing both at the perceptual and representational level. Human beings can effortlessly recall perceptions even in absence of the appropriate sensory information 1 , e.g. when we mentally evoke a familiar landscape. Commonly defined as "mental imagery", such a mental reproduction of physical objects' properties is not limited to perception, but also it extends to movements 2. In this case it is defined "motor imagery" and is characterized by the activation of sensorimotor representations even in absence of overt execution 3. Since the dawn of experimental psychology, a particular interest in motor imagery has driven the attention of the precursors of today's cognitive neuroscience. Alexander Bain's "Simulation Theory" 4 proposed that motor imagery and overt movements rely on similar cognitive mechanisms and neural underpinnings. More recent evidence supports this view, showing that the time to imagine and perform a specific action is proportional 5 , and that imagined and executed movements activate partially overlapping brain networks 6. An objective measurement of the temporal properties of motor imagery is provided by a cognitive task called "mental rotation", in which participants judge the laterality of rotated images while response times (RTs) and accuracy are recorded 7. In case of bodily images, mental rotation depends on the nature of the images. When hand images are mentally rotated, the performance strongly depends on image orientation (RTs linearly increase from 0° to 180° rotation and vice versa until 360°) 8 and is influenced by actual proprioceptive input 9. Conversely, mental rotation of full-bodies is less dependent on orientation 10 and proprioception 11. In addition, the absence of proprioceptive input (as after complete spinal cord injury) affects the interplay between visual and sensorimotor components in the representation of the disconnected body parts (feet, in the case of complete spinal cord injury) 12. Thus, previous work suggests that mental rotation of local bodily images (hands) recruits mainly sensorimotor mechanisms, while mental rotation of global bodily images (full-bodies) is mostly based on visual mechanisms. On this basis, it can be hypothesized that, at the neural level, mental rotation of hands would be associated with the activation of prefrontal, pre-central, and post-central regions, while mental rotation of full-bodies would recruit more strongly the temporo-occipital cortex. Only very few studies compared mental rotation of body parts and full-bodies, only behavioral data were recorded, and the two classes of used images differed in terms of visual

2018

SummaryTwo types of working memory (WM) have recently been proposed: conscious active WM, depending on sustained neural activity, and activity-silent WM, requiring neither conscious awareness nor accompanying neural activity. However, whether both states support identical forms of information processing is unknown. Theory predicts that activity-silent states are confined to passive storage and cannot operate on stored information. To determine whether an explicit reactivation is required prior to the manipulation of information in WM, we evaluated whether participants could mentally rotate brief visual stimuli of variable subjective visibility. Behaviorally, even for unseen targets, subjects reported the rotated location above chance after several seconds. As predicted, however, such blindsight performance was accompanied by neural signatures of conscious reactivation at the time of mental rotation, including a sustained desynchronization in alpha/beta frequency and a decodable repr...

Behavioural Brain Research, 2010

Mental rotation of body parts is influenced by specific sensory-motor information, and may be performed using an egocentric (subject-based) or an object-based mental transformation. Neurologically healthy volunteers were asked to verbally judge the laterality of visually presented human face, owl face and front of a car with a black patch over one eye/headlight, presented in one of eight orientations. Subjects may or may not have their head held in a head brace. The transformation used to solve the task was assessed with a questionnaire. Response times were non-monotonical at 180 • for the object-based group, but not for the group using egocentric transformation. Having head movement constrained by the use of a head brace ("fixed") or not ("moving") did not influence performance. Within the two groups, no differences were found between the three types of stimuli. Hence, the response profile for mental rotation of human faces and face-like stimuli depended on the type of mental spatial transformation used to solve the task, independently from the possibility to move the head and from the kind of stimuli processed.

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