Publication Date
12-2-2024
Journal
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
DOI
10.1098/rstb.2023.0083
PMID
39428879
PMCID
PMC11491853
PubMedCentral® Posted Date
10-21-2024
PubMedCentral® Full Text Version
Post-print
Published Open-Access
yes
Keywords
Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Adult, Male, Female, Visual Perception, Space Perception, Young Adult, Proof of Concept Study, Attention, Brain Mapping, Brain, cortical blindness, mechanisms and methods of individualized neuromodulation, visuospatial perception and cognition
Abstract
This proof-of-concept study uses individualized functional magnetic resonance imaging neuromodulation (iNM) to explore the mechanisms that enhance BOLD signals in visuospatial perception (VP) networks that are crucial for navigation. Healthy participants (n = 8) performed a VP up- and down-direction discrimination task at full and subthreshold coherence through peripheral vision, and superimposed direction through visual imagery (VI) at central space under iNM and control conditions. iNM targets individualized anatomical and functional middle- and medial-superior temporal (MST) networks that control VP. We found that iNM engaged selective exteroceptive and interoceptive attention (SEIA) and motor planning (MP) networks. Specifically, iNM increased overall: (i) area under the curve of the BOLD magnitude: 100% in VP (but decreased for weak coherences), 21–47% in VI, 26–59% in MP and 48–76% in SEIA through encoding; and (ii) classification performance for each direction, coherence and network through decoding, predicting stimuli from brain maps. Our findings, derived from encoding and decoding models, suggest that mechanisms induced by iNM are causally linked in enhancing visuospatial networks and demonstrate iNM as a feasibility treatment for low-vision patients with cortical blindness or visuospatial impairments that precede cognitive decline.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Neurofeedback: new territories and neurocognitive mechanisms of endogenous neuromodulation’.
