Aims. While studies on healthy subjects have shown a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits, few have investigated brain activity during motor imagery in stroke patients with hemiparesis. This work is aimed at examining similarities between motor imagery and execution in a group of stroke patients. Materials and Methods. Eleven patients were asked to perfo...

Previous research has shown that readers generate mental images of events. Most studies have investigated imagery during the reading of short texts, which also included explicit judgment tasks. In two fMRI studies, we assessed whether modality-specific imagery occurs during naturalistic, discourse comprehension. We identified clauses in the texts that elicited auditory, motor, or visual imagery...

This study explored individual differences in eye movements during visual imagery. Eye movements were recorded for participants who recalled a picture from memory while looking at a blank screen. All participants were tested for working memory capacity and the OSIVQ (Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov, 2009) was used as an assessment for individual differences in object imagery, spatial imagery and verb...

Objective. To investigate whether motor imagery ability recovers in stroke patients and to see what the relationship is between different types of imagery and motor functioning after stroke. Methods. 12 unilateral stroke patients were measured at 3 and 6 weeks poststroke on 3 mental imagery tasks. Arm-hand function was evaluated using the Utrecht Arm-Hand task and the Brunnström Fugl-Meyer Scal...

Research on mental imagery has shown that when we imagine something, the related neural processes overlap with those related to actually perceiving or performing that same percept or action (Kosslyn et al., 2001). Although visual imagery has long been the dominant modality for the investigation of sensory imagery, involvement of modality-specific brain regions (i.e., visual areas being implicat...

Visual mental imagery (which involves generating and transforming visual mental representations, i.e., seeing with the mind's eye) and visual attention appear to be distinct processes. However, some researchers have claimed that imagery effects can be explained by appeal to attention (and thus, that imagery is nothing more than a form of attention). In this study, we used a size manipulation to...

The purpose of the study was to examine the influence of a mental imagery workshop on athletes’ subsequent use of imagery. The participants were 36 female basketball players from three different levels of a high school basketball league: bantam, midget, and juvenile. Two different types of self-report measures were used to assess patterns of imagery use over a six week period following the work...

Motor imagery is one common paradigm in brain computer interface (BCI) systems where the user imagines moving a part of his/her body to control a computer. Motor imagery is endogenous and requires a large amount of training for the user to be able to control the BCI. Therefore, the feedback that is provided to the user is critical to ensure informative insight into improving imagery skills. In ...

This paper examines the role of mental imagery in music performance. Self-reports by musicians, and various other sources of anecdotal evidence, suggest that covert auditory, motor, and/or visual imagery facilitate multiple aspects of music performance. The cognitive and motor mechanisms that underlie such imagery include working memory, action simulation, and internal models. Together these me...

Depression is a global health problem requiring treatment innovation. Targeting neglected cognitive aspects may provide a useful route. We tested a cognitive-training paradigm using positive mental imagery (imagery cognitive bias modification, imagery CBM), developed via experimental psychopathology studies, in a randomized controlled trial. Training was delivered via the Internet to 150 indivi...