A positron emission tomography study of oculomotor imagery.

Focal increases of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were measured by positron emission tomography in order to study the anatomo-functional analogies between imagined and executed saccadic eye movements. Oculomotor imagery was performed in the absence of overt eye movements. Compared with a control state the two conditions were associated with normalized rCBF increases in the median cingulate gyrus, and the supplementary and frontal eye fields of both hemispheres. Therefore in the human brain execution and mental imagery of eye movement appear to be functionally linked and mediated by a common network of frontal structures.