Li Yanyan, Tan Zheng, Wang Jing, Wang Mengyang, Wang Liang
CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Front Neurosci. 2022 Jul 22;16:918767. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.918767. eCollection 2022.
Offline perceptions are self-generated sensations that do not involve physical stimulus. These perceptions can be induced by external hallucinated objects or internal imagined objects. However, how the brain dissociates these visual sensations remains unclear. We aimed to map the brain areas involved in internal and external visual sensations induced by intracranial electrical stimulation and further investigate their neural differences. In this study, we collected subjective reports of internal and external visual sensations elicited by electrical stimulation in 40 drug-refractory epilepsy during presurgical evaluation. The response rate was calculated and compared to quantify the dissociated distribution of visual responses. We found that internal and external visual sensations could be elicited when different brain areas were stimulated, although there were more overlapping brain areas. Specifically, stimulation of the hippocampus and inferior temporal cortex primarily induces internal visual sensations. In contrast, stimulation of the occipital visual cortex mainly triggers external visual sensations. Furthermore, compared to that of the dorsal visual areas, the ventral visual areas show more overlap between the two visual sensations. Our findings show that internal and external visual sensations may rely on distinct neural representations of the visual pathway. This study indicated that implantation of electrodes in ventral visual areas should be considered during the evaluation of visual sensation aura epileptic seizures.
离线感知是不涉及物理刺激的自我产生的感觉。这些感知可以由外部幻觉物体或内部想象物体诱发。然而，大脑如何区分这些视觉感觉仍不清楚。我们旨在绘制颅内电刺激诱发的内部和外部视觉感觉所涉及的脑区，并进一步研究它们的神经差异。在本研究中，我们收集了40例药物难治性癫痫患者在术前评估期间电刺激诱发的内部和外部视觉感觉的主观报告。计算并比较反应率以量化视觉反应的分离分布。我们发现，当刺激不同脑区时，可诱发内部和外部视觉感觉，尽管存在更多重叠的脑区。具体而言，刺激海马体和颞下回皮质主要诱发内部视觉感觉。相比之下，刺激枕叶视觉皮质主要引发外部视觉感觉。此外，与背侧视觉区域相比，腹侧视觉区域在两种视觉感觉之间表现出更多重叠。我们的研究结果表明，内部和外部视觉感觉可能依赖于视觉通路中不同的神经表征。这项研究表明，在评估视觉感觉先兆癫痫发作时，应考虑在腹侧视觉区域植入电极。
