| Literature DB >> 23874672 |
Maryam Fourtassi1, Abderrazak Hajjioui, Christian Urquizar, Yves Rossetti, Gilles Rode, Laure Pisella.
Abstract
It remains unclear whether spontaneous eye movements during visual imagery reflect the mental generation of a visual image (i.e. the arrangement of the component parts of a mental representation). To address this specificity, we recorded eye movements in an imagery task and in a phonological fluency (non-imagery) task, both consisting in naming French towns from long-term memory. Only in the condition of visual imagery the spontaneous eye positions reflected the geographic position of the towns evoked by the subjects. This demonstrates that eye positions closely reflect the mapping of mental images. Advanced analysis of gaze positions using the bi-dimensional regression model confirmed the spatial correlation of gaze and towns' locations in every single individual in the visual imagery task and in none of the individuals when no imagery accompanied memory retrieval. In addition, the evolution of the bi-dimensional regression's coefficient of determination revealed, in each individual, a process of generating several iterative series of a limited number of towns mapped with the same spatial distortion, despite different individual order of towns' evocation and different individual mappings. Such consistency across subjects revealed by gaze (the mind's eye) gives empirical support to theories postulating that visual imagery, like visual sampling, is an iterative fragmented processing.Entities:
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Year: 2013 PMID: 23874672 PMCID: PMC3714244 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0068560
Source DB: PubMed Journal: PLoS One ISSN: 1932-6203 Impact factor: 3.240
Figure 1Schematic explanation of the bi-dimensional regression (BDR) according to the Euclidian model and its graphical representation using Darcy Software (inspired from [37]).
Figure 2Spatial correspondence analysis.
1) Grouping in four quadrants according to the reference center for both systems of coordinates; the gaze coordinates (a) and the GPS coordinates (b). 2) Determining the degree of remoteness from the reference centre for each system of coordinates; gaze coordinates (c) and GPS coordinates (d). The circle represents a 50% degree of remoteness from the centre according to Dmax.
Total number of given town names in the two tasks.
| Subject number | Imagery Task | Control task |
| 1 | 25 | 11 |
| 2 | 66 | 30 |
| 3 | 10 | 15 |
| 4 | 27 | 19 |
| 5 | 40 | 20 |
| 6 | 36 | 14 |
| 7 | 38 | 37 |
| 8 | 35 | 20 |
| 9 | 44 | 15 |
| 10 | 31 | 15 |
| Total Number | 352 | 196 |
Difference between observed and chance-expected correct eye positions, in the visual imagery task.
| Eye position coding | % of correct eye positions | Statistical significance Wilcoxon signed rank statistic |
| Low correspondance | 35 | W = 52, z = −2.65, p = 0.008 |
| High correspondance | 18.5 | W = 50, z = −2,54, p = 0.01 |
Difference between observed and chance-expected correct eye positions, in the phonological fluency task.
| Eye position coding | % correct eye positions | Statistical significance Wilcoxon signed rank statistic |
| Low correspondance | 25 | W = 2, z = −0.10, p = 0.20 |
| High correspondance | 9.5 | W = 5, z = −1.27, p = 0.92 |
Statistical significance (F test) and BDR coefficient of correlation (R) in each subject, in the two experimental conditions, with gaze locations being the dependent variables and towns’ GPS positions being the independent variables.
| Subjects | Phonological fluency task | Visual imagery task | ||
| p-value | R | p-value | R | |
| 1 | 0.823 | 0.14 | 0.0001 | 0.61 |
| 2 | 0.322 | 0.17 | 0.05 | 0.39 |
| 3 | 0.803 | 0.1 | 0.0001 | 0.87 |
| 4 | 0.562 | 0.17 | 0.0001 | 0.67 |
| 5 | 0.503 | 0.17 | 0.0001 | 0.55 |
| 6 | 0.185 | 0.36 | 0.0001 | 0.51 |
| 7 | 0.685 | 0.14 | 0.0001 | 0.48 |
| 8 | 0.461 | 0.2 | 0.0001 | 0.85 |
| 9 | 0.546 | 0.2 | 0.0001 | 0.68 |
| 10 | 0.450 | 0.22 | 0.01 | 0.36 |
Figure 3Graphic representation of the cognitive map of France as reflected by gaze positions for the subject n°1, after adjustment and interpolation, according to BDR and using Darcy software.
(a) The coefficient of determination (R2) of BDR in the subject n°1, in the imagery condition, according to the number of towns evoked in chronological order. The curve shows 4 drastic drops pointed by arrows. (b) Representation of all the towns evoked by the subject n°1 during the 2 minutes duration of the imagery task, where the green points correspond to the adjusted gaze positions and the blue points represent the real GPS positions of the same towns. (c) Graphic representations of gaze positions, limited to small sequences of towns in their chronological order, in the same subject. The cut-off between these sequences was defined by the abrupt decreases in the R2 curve.