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Purpose Researchers have proposed that multiple factors such as hyperarousal, conditioning, worrying, or cortical arousal play roles in the predisposition to, initiation, and perpetuation of insomnia disorder. Previously, only a few studies investigated the differential effects of intrusive visual imagery (IVI) and intrusive verbal thoughts (IVT) on pre-sleep arousal or insomnia severity. The aim of the current cross-sectional study was to examine these effects as well as the moderator role of visual imagery ability (VIA) on the relationship between IVI and pre-sleep arousal. Methods A path model comprising the variables of IVI, IVT, pre-sleep arousal, and insomnia severity was tested with 166 of 1444 participants ( M age = 25.5, SD  = 5.26) who were identified as having insomnia disorder based on a 12-question form corresponding to DSM-5 criteria for insomnia disorder and Insomnia Severity Index scores (≥ 8). The moderator role of VIA on the relationship between IVI and pre-sleep arousal was evaluated with a moderation analysis. Results It was found that IVI (β = 0.44, p < .001), but not IVT (β = 0.15, p = .12), significantly predicted pre-sleep arousal and pre-sleep arousal (β = 0.44, p < .001) significantly predicted insomnia severity. In addition, the indirect effect of IVI via pre-sleep arousal (IE = 0.19, p < .001) on insomnia severity was significant. Finally, the moderator role of VIA on the relationship between IVI and pre-sleep arousal (p = .07) was not significant. Conclusions IVI may play a more important role in insomnia disorder than IVT. Interventions targeting pre-sleep visual imagery can help poor sleepers alleviate insomnia severity.

Most intranasal oxytocin research to date has been carried out in men, but recent studies indicate that females’ responses can differ substantially from males’. This randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study involved an all-female sample of 28 women not using hormonal contraception. Participants viewed animations of geometric shapes depicting either random movement or social interactions such as playing, chasing, or fighting. Probe questions asked whether any shapes were “friends” or “not friends.” Social videos were preceded by cues to attend to either social relationships or physical size changes. All subjects received intranasal placebo spray at scan 1. While the experimenter was not blinded to nasal spray contents at Scan 1, the participants were. Scan 2 followed a randomized, double-blind design. At scan 2, half received a second placebo dose while the other half received 24 IU of intranasal oxytocin. We measured neural responses to these animations at baseline, as well as the change in neural activity induced by oxytocin. Oxytocin reduced activation in early visual cortex and dorsal-stream motion processing regions for the social > size contrast, indicating reduced activity related to social attention. Oxytocin also reduced endorsements that shapes were “friends” or “not friends,” and this significantly correlated with reduction in neural activation. Furthermore, participants who perceived fewer social relationships at baseline were more likely to show oxytocin-induced increases in a broad network of regions involved in social perception and social cognition, suggesting that lower social processing at baseline may predict more positive neural responses to oxytocin. •A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled fMRI study of intranasal oxytocin.•Neural response of females was measured during animations of interacting shapes.•Oxytocin (OXT) reduced activation in early visual cortex and dorsal stream regions.•OXT reduced perception of social relationships.••OXT increased social cognition networks in females with lower baseline perception

In this study, we aimed to (1) translate the English version of the Kinesthetic and Visual Imagery Questionnaire (KVIQ), which assesses motor imagery ability, into Japanese, and (2) investigate the reliability and validity of the Japanese KVIQ. We enrolled 28 healthy adults in this study. We used Cronbach’s alpha coefficients to assess reliability reflected by the internal consistency. Additionally, we assessed validity reflected by the criterion-related validity between the Japanese KVIQ and the Japanese version of the Movement Imagery Questionnaire-Revised (MIQ-R) with Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the KVIQ-20 were 0.88 (Visual) and 0.91 (Kinesthetic), which indicates high reliability. There was a significant positive correlation between the Japanese KVIQ-20 (Total) and the Japanese MIQ-R (Total) (r = 0.86, p < 0.01). Our results suggest that the Japanese KVIQ is an assessment that is a reliable and valid index of motor imagery ability.

Anticipating the behaviour of moving objects in the physical environment is essential for a wide range of daily actions. This ability is thought to rely on mental simulations and has been shown to involve frontoparietal and early visual areas. Yet, the connectivity patterns between these regions during intuitive physical inference remain largely unknown. In this study, participants underwent fMRI while performing a task requiring them to infer the parabolic trajectory of an occluded ball falling under Newtonian physics, and a control task. Building on our previous research showing that when solving the physical inference task, early visual areas encode task-specific and perception-like information about the inferred trajectory, the present study aimed to (i) identify regions that are functionally coupled with early visual areas during the physical inference task, and (ii) investigate changes in effective connectivity within this network of regions. We found that early visual areas are functionally connected to a set of parietal and premotor regions when inferring occluded trajectories. Using dynamic causal modelling, we show that predicting occluded trajectories is associated with changes in effective connectivity within a parieto-premotor network, which may drive internally generated early visual activity in a top-down fashion. These findings offer new insights into the interaction between early visual and frontoparietal regions during physical inference, contributing to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the ability to predict physical outcomes.

White matter (WM) functional activity has been reliably detected through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Previous studies have primarily examined WM bundles as unified entities, thereby obscuring the functional heterogeneity inherent within these bundles. Here, for the first time, we investigate the function of sub‐bundles of a prototypical visual WM tract—the optic radiation (OR). We use the 7T retinotopy dataset from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) to reconstruct OR and further subdivide the OR into sub‐bundles based on the fiber's termination in the primary visual cortex (V1). The population receptive field (pRF) model is then applied to evaluate the retinotopic properties of these sub‐bundles, and the consistency of the pRF properties of sub‐bundles with those of V1 subfields is evaluated. Furthermore, we utilize the HCP working memory dataset to evaluate the activations of the foveal and peripheral OR sub‐bundles, along with LGN and V1 subfields, during 0‐back and 2‐back tasks. We then evaluate differences in 2bk‐0bk contrast between foveal and peripheral sub‐bundles (or subfields), and further examine potential relationships between 2bk‐0bk contrast and 2‐back task d‐prime. The results show that the pRF properties of OR sub‐bundles exhibit standard retinotopic properties and are typically similar to the properties of V1 subfields. Notably, activations during the 2‐back task consistently surpass those under the 0‐back task across foveal and peripheral OR sub‐bundles, as well as LGN and V1 subfields. The foveal V1 displays significantly higher 2bk‐0bk contrast than peripheral V1. The 2‐back task d‐prime shows strong correlations with 2bk‐0bk contrast for foveal and peripheral OR fibers. These findings demonstrate that the blood oxygen level‐dependent (BOLD) signals of OR sub‐bundles encode high‐fidelity visual information, underscoring the feasibility of assessing WM functional activity at the sub‐bundle level. Additionally, the study highlights the role of OR in the top‐down processes of visual working memory beyond the bottom‐up processes for visual information transmission. Conclusively, this study innovatively proposes a novel paradigm for analyzing WM fiber tracts at the individual sub‐bundle level and expands understanding of OR function. We explored the retinotopic properties and the top‐down information transmission characteristics of the optic radiation (OR) sub‐bundles. We revealed that the blood oxygen level‐dependent (BOLD) signals of OR sub‐bundles can encode high‐fidelity visual information, underscoring the feasibility of assessing white matter functional activity at the tract sub‐bundle level. Moreover, the OR engages top‐down visual working memory processes beyond the bottom‐up processes for visual information transmission.

Mental imagery provides an essential simulation tool for remembering the past and planning the future, with its strength affecting both cognition and mental health. Research suggests that neural activity spanning prefrontal, parietal, temporal, and visual areas supports the generation of mental images. Exactly how this network controls the strength of visual imagery remains unknown. Here, brain imaging and transcranial magnetic phosphene data show that lower resting activity and excitability levels in early visual cortex (V1-V3) predict stronger sensory imagery. Further, electrically decreasing visual cortex excitability using tDCS increases imagery strength, demonstrating a causative role of visual cortex excitability in controlling visual imagery. Together, these data suggest a neurophysiological mechanism of cortical excitability involved in controlling the strength of mental images.

Aphantasia is the condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery. So far, behavioural differences between aphantasics and non-aphantasics have hardly been studied as the base rate of those affected is quite low. The aim of the study was to examine if attentional guidance in aphantasics is impaired by their lack of visual imagery. In two visual search tasks, an already established one by Moriya ( Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics , 80 (5), 1127-1142, 2018) and a newly developed one, we examined whether aphantasics are primed less by their visual imagery than non-aphantasics. The sample in Study 1 consisted of 531 and the sample in Study 2 consisted of 325 age-matched pairs of aphantasics and non-aphantasics. Moriya’s Task was not capable of showing the expected effect, whereas the new developed task was. These results could mainly be attributed to different task characteristics. Therefore, a lack of attentional guidance through visual imagery in aphantasics can be assumed and interpreted as new evidence in the imagery debate, showing that mental images actually influence information processing and are not merely epiphenomena of propositional processing.