Date of Award

Spring 4-19-2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (BS)

Department

Neuroscience Institute

First Advisor

Jessica Turner

Second Advisor

Heather Kleider-Offutt

Abstract

Mental imagery is the act of using the “mind’s eyes and ears” to generate and experience sensory information that is absent in the external environment. The vividness of mental imagery varies across individuals, but not much is known about what contributes to these differences. This exploratory study investigates the possible relationship between resting-state functional connectivity and the vividness of mental imagery. We performed a seed-based connectivity analysis on resting-state scans of two groups of healthy control subjects with Brodmann area 19, the precuneus, the superior temporal gyrus, the hippocampus, and the posterior cingulate cortex as regions of interest. Although the underlying functional network connectivity was the same across groups, there was no groupwise replication of pairwise connectivities associated with either visual or auditory mental imagery vividness. The lack of replication may be due to a number of factors, but we highlight the impact of asking one group about the vividness of their imagery after each task-based trial and not the other. This may have primed the individuals in the former group to be in a self-referential state of mind during the resting-state scan, affecting the pairwise connectivity relationships to either imagery modality.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/22686808

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