Decoding the direction of imagined visual motion using 7T ultra-high field fMRI.
There is a long-standing debate about the neurocognitive implementation of mental imagery. One form of mental imagery is the imagery of visual motion, which is of interest due to its naturalistic and dynamic character. However, so far only the mere occurrence rather than the specific content of motion imagery was shown to be detectable. In the current study, the application of multi-voxel pattern analysis to high-resolution functional data of 12 subjects acquired with ultra-high field 7T functional magnetic resonance imaging allowed us to show that imagery of visual motion can indeed activate the earliest levels of the visual hierarchy, but the extent thereof varies highly between subjects. Our approach enabled classification not only of complex imagery, but also of its actual contents, in that the direction of imagined motion out of four options was successfully identified in two thirds of the subjects and with accuracies of up to 91.3% in individual subjects. A searchlight analysis confirmed the local origin of decodable information in striate and extra-striate cortex. These high-accuracy findings not only shed new light on a central question in vision science on the constituents of mental imagery, but also show for the first time that the specific sub-categorical content of visual motion imagery is reliably decodable from brain imaging data on a single-subject level.
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6229 EV Maastricht, The Netherlands; Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, 6229 ER Maastricht, The Netherlands. Electronic address: thomas.emmerling@maastrichtuniversity.nl.
Thomas C
TC
Emmerling
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6229 EV Maastricht, The Netherlands; Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, 6229 ER Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Jan
J
Zimmermann
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6229 EV Maastricht, The Netherlands; Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, 6229 ER Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Bettina
B
Sorger
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6229 EV Maastricht, The Netherlands; Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, 6229 ER Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Martin A
MA
Frost
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6229 EV Maastricht, The Netherlands; Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, 6229 ER Maastricht, The Netherlands; Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN), 1105 BA Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Rainer
R
Goebel
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*
Decoding; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Multi-voxel pattern analysis; Ultra-high field MRI; Visual mental imagery