title: Multiple routes to mental animation: language and functional relations drive motion processing for static images.
abstract: When looking at static visual images, people often exhibit mental animation, anticipating visual events that have not yet happened. But what determines when mental animation occurs? Measuring mental animation using localized brain function (visual motion processing in the middle temporal and middle superior temporal areas, MT+), we demonstrated that animating static pictures of objects is dependent both on the functionally relevant spatial arrangement that objects have with one another (e.g., a bottle above a glass vs. a glass above a bottle) and on the linguistic judgment to be made about those objects (e.g., "Is the bottle above the glass?" vs. "Is the bottle bigger than the glass?"). Furthermore, we showed that mental animation is driven by functional relations and language separately in the right hemisphere of the brain but conjointly in the left hemisphere. Mental animation is not a unitary construct; the predictions humans make about the visual world are driven flexibly, with hemispheric asymmetry in the routes to MT+ activation.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, UK. k.coventry@uea.ac.uk
authors.forename: Kenny R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Coventry
authors.forename: Thomas B
authors.initials: TB
authors.lastname: Christophel
authors.forename: Thorsten
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Fehr
authors.forename: Berenice
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Valdés-Conroy
authors.forename: Manfred
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Herrmann
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D059907:Functional Neuroimaging; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D007802:Language; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: fMRI; hemispheric differences; language; mental animation; motion processing; neuroimaging; prediction; visual perception