Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 41, Issue 1, 15 May 2008, Pages 145-152
NeuroImage

Right temporopolar activation associated with unique perception

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.01.059Get rights and content

Unique mode of perception, or the ability to see things differently from others, is one of the psychological resources required for creative mental activities. Behavioral studies using ambiguous visual stimuli have successfully induced diverse responses from subjects, and the unique responses defined in this paradigm were observed in higher frequency in the artistic population as compared to the nonartistic population. However, the neural substrates that underlie such unique perception have yet to be investigated. In the present study, ten ambiguous figures were used as stimuli. The subjects were instructed to say what the figures looked like during functional MRI scanning. The responses were classified as “frequent”, “infrequent” or “unique” responses based on the appearance frequency of the same response in an independent age- and gender-matched control group. An event-related analysis contrasting unique vs. frequent responses revealed the greatest activation in the right temporal pole, which survived a whole brain multiple comparison. An alternative parametric modulation analysis was also performed to show that potentially confounding perceptual effects deriving from differences in visual stimuli make no significant contribution to this temporopolar activation. Previous neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies have shown the involvement of the temporal pole in perception–emotion linkage. Thus, our results suggest that unique perception is produced by the integration of perceptual and emotional processes, and this integration might underlie essential parts of creative mental activities.

Section snippets

Subjects

Normal, right-handed, native Japanese volunteers were recruited from the inter-college community by advertisement and were screened by a structured interview to exclude history of psychiatric or neurological illness. Sixty-eight subjects (41 females, age 20–36 years, each with more than 14 years of education) who were naïve to the stimuli participated in the imaging experiment. All gave informed consent in keeping with experimental procedures approved by the Institutional Review Board of the

Results

The mean number and standard deviations of the responses in the experimental subjects supplied for each of the three categories (unique, infrequent and frequent) were 11.6 ± 8.9, 12.0 ± 6.5, and 15.8 ± 5.1, respectively. The singular and diverse nature of the unique responses is indicated by the fact that each response type included in the “unique” category was produced only by 1.2 ± 0.5 of experimental subjects on average (± SD), whereas each response type included in the “frequent” category was

Discussion

The present event-related fMRI study revealed differential activity in the right temporopolar regions at the time of vocal onset of unique vs. frequent responses. This result was confirmed by the alternative parametric modulation analysis that was performed to eliminate potentially confounding perceptual effects of the stimuli.

In this experiment, in which subjects responded vocally in the scanner, activation related to vocal movements derived from the movements of the nasopharyngeal organs

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Drs. A. Ikeda, Y. Inaba and N. Sato for technical assistance and useful advice. This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research (19002010) to Y. M. and a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C (17500203) to S. K. from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, and a Grant from the Takeda Foundation and Nakayama Foundation for Science, Technology and Culture to Y. M.

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