Shine James M, Keogh Rebecca, O'Callaghan Claire, Muller Alana J, Lewis Simon J G, Pearson Joel
Brain and Mind Research Institute, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
School of Psychology, University of NSW, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Proc Biol Sci. 2015 Jan 7;282(1798):20142047. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.2047.
Visual hallucinations occur when our conscious experience does not accurately reflect external reality. However, these dissociations also regularly occur when we imagine the world around us in the absence of visual stimulation. We used two novel behavioural paradigms to objectively measure visual hallucinations and voluntary mental imagery in 19 individuals with Parkinson's disease (ten with visual hallucinations; nine without) and ten healthy, age-matched controls. We then used this behavioural overlap to interrogate the connectivity both within and between the major attentional control networks using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients with visual hallucinations had elevated mental imagery strength compared with patients without hallucinations and controls. Specifically, the sensory strength of imagery predicted the frequency of visual hallucinations. Together, hallucinations and mental imagery predicted multiple abnormalities in functional connectivity both within and between the attentional control networks, as measured with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, the two phenomena were also dissociable at the neural level, with both mental imagery and visual misperceptions associated with specific abnormalities in attentional network connectivity. Our results provide the first evidence of both the shared and unique neural correlates of these two similar, yet distinct phenomena.
当我们的意识体验不能准确反映外部现实时,就会出现视幻觉。然而,当我们在没有视觉刺激的情况下想象周围的世界时,这种脱节现象也经常发生。我们使用了两种新颖的行为范式,对19名帕金森病患者(10名有视幻觉;9名没有)和10名年龄匹配的健康对照者的视幻觉和自愿性心理意象进行了客观测量。然后,我们利用这种行为上的重叠,通过静息态功能磁共振成像来探究主要注意力控制网络内部和之间的连通性。有视幻觉的患者与没有幻觉的患者及对照者相比,其心理意象强度更高。具体而言,意象的感觉强度可预测视幻觉的频率。视幻觉和心理意象共同预测了注意力控制网络内部和之间功能连通性的多种异常情况,这是通过静息态功能磁共振成像测量得出的。然而,这两种现象在神经层面也是可分离的,心理意象和视觉错误感知都与注意力网络连通性的特定异常有关。我们的研究结果首次证明了这两种相似但又不同的现象在神经方面的共同和独特关联。