Functional neuroimaging

Summary

Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions. It is primarily used as a research tool in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and social neuroscience. Overview Common methods of functional neuroimaging include

Positron emission tomography (PET)
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
Electroencephalography (EEG)
Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)
Single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT)
Functional ultrasound imaging (fUS)

PET, fMRI, fNIRS and fUS can measure localized changes in cerebral blood flow related to neural activity. These changes are referred to as activations. Regions of the brain which are activated when a subject performs a particular task may play a role in the neural computations which

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_neuroimaging

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Neural Mechanisms of the Embodied Self

Ravi Tej Sai Giridhar Tadi

What is it like to have a body? The unitary experience of the self and the body accompanied by unambiguous self-location and egocentric visuo-spatial perspective are essential aspects of the embodied self. They play a vital role for dynamic whole body human perception and interactions in our daily lives and help distinguish our body from others and the environment. In the current thesis, we used an amalgam of virtual reality techniques and cognitive neuroscience methods in combination with electrical neuroimaging to investigate multisensory, sensorimotor, and cognitive processes involved in mental own body imagery, visuo-spatial perspective taking, the feeling of ownership and agency and their contribution to different aspects of the bodily self and bodily processing.

EPFL2011

Self in time: imagined self-location influences neural activity related to mental time travel

Olaf Blanke

Conscious awareness of the self as continuous through time is attributed to the human ability to remember the past and to predict the future, a cogitation that has been called "mental time travel" (MTT). MTT allows one to re-experience one's own past by subjectively "locating" the self to a previously experienced place and time, or to pre-experience an event by locating the self into the future. Here, we used a novel behavioral paradigm in combination with evoked potential mapping and electrical neuroimaging, revealing that MTT is composed of two different cognitive processes: absolute MTT, which is the location of the self to different points in time (past, present, or future), and relative MTT, which is the location of one's self with respect to the experienced event (relative past and relative future). These processes recruit a network of brain areas in distinct time periods including the occipitotemporal, temporoparietal, and anteromedial temporal cortices. Our findings suggest that in addition to autobiographical memory processes, the cognitive mechanisms of MTT also involve mental imagery and self-location, and that relative MTT, but not absolute MTT, is more strongly directed to future prediction than to past recollection.

2008

Multisensory experiences influence subsequent memory performance and brain responses. Studies have thus far concentrated on semantically congruent pairings, leaving unresolved the influence of stimulus pairing and memory sub-types. Here, we paired images with unique, meaningless sounds during a continuous recognition task to determine if purely episodic, single-trial multisensory experiences can incidentally impact subsequent visual object discrimination. Psychophysics and electrical neuroimaging analyses of visual evoked potentials (VEPs) compared responses to repeated images either paired or not with a meaningless sound during initial encounters. Recognition accuracy was significantly impaired for images initially presented as multisensory pairs and could not be explained in terms of differential attention or transfer of effects from encoding to retrieval. VEP modulations occurred at 100-130ms and 270-310ms and stemmed from topographic differences indicative of network configuration changes within the brain. Distributed source estimations localized the earlier effect to regions of the right posterior temporal gyrus (STG) and the later effect to regions of the middle temporal gyrus (MTG). Responses in these regions were stronger for images previously encountered as multisensory pairs. Only the later effect correlated with performance such that greater MTG activity in response to repeated visual stimuli was linked with greater performance decrements. The present findings suggest that brain networks involved in this discrimination may critically depend on whether multisensory events facilitate or impair later visual memory performance. More generally, the data support models whereby effects of multisensory interactions persist to incidentally affect subsequent behavior as well as visual processing during its initial stages.

Elsevier2012