Scientific Institute IRCCS "Eugenio Medea", Polo FVG, Pasian di Prato, Italy.
Department of Neurosciences and Mental Health, Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milan, Italy.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2022 Sep;43(13):4116-4127. doi: 10.1002/hbm.25906. Epub 2022 May 12.
Mental imagery is part of people's own internal processing and plays an important role in everyday life, cognition and pathology. The neural network supporting mental imagery is bottom-up modulated by the imagery content. Here, we examined the complex associations of gender and age with the neural mechanisms underlying emotion imagery. We assessed the brain circuits involved in emotion mental imagery (vs. action imagery), controlled by a letter detection task on the same stimuli, chosen to ensure attention to the stimuli and to discourage imagery, in 91 men and women aged 14-65 years using fMRI. In women, compared with men, emotion imagery significantly increased activation within the right putamen, which is involved in emotional processing. Increasing age, significantly decreased mental imagery-related activation in the left insula and cingulate cortex, areas involved in awareness of ones' internal states, and it significantly decreased emotion verbs-related activation in the left putamen, which is part of the limbic system. This finding suggests a top-down mechanism by which gender and age, in interaction with bottom-up effect of type of stimulus, or directly, can modulate the brain mechanisms underlying mental imagery.
心理意象是人们内部加工的一部分，在日常生活、认知和病理学中起着重要作用。支持心理意象的神经网络会受到意象内容的自下而上的调节。在这里，我们研究了性别和年龄与情绪意象神经机制的复杂关联。我们评估了 91 名年龄在 14 至 65 岁的男性和女性在使用 fMRI 时，使用相同刺激物上的字母检测任务控制下，参与情绪心理意象（与动作意象相比）的大脑回路。与男性相比，女性的情绪意象会显著增加右侧壳核的激活，而右侧壳核参与情绪处理。随着年龄的增长，与心理意象相关的左脑岛和扣带皮层的激活显著减少，而这些区域与对自身内部状态的意识有关，同时，左壳核的情绪动词相关激活也显著减少，左壳核是边缘系统的一部分。这一发现表明，性别和年龄会与刺激类型的自下而上影响或直接相互作用，通过自上而下的机制来调节心理意象的大脑机制。
