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Splitting Mental Imagery: A Divided Visual Field Adaptation of the Mental Imagery fMRI Paradigm for future Split-Brain Application

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 4 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon F.

Mrs. Selin Bekir¹ (), Tyler Santander¹, Emma Kates-Harbeck¹, Lukas J. Volz², Michael B. Miller¹; ¹University of California, Santa Barbara, ²University of Cologne

Mental imagery tasks in fMRI, such as imagining playing tennis or navigating through one's home, have been used to detect volitional brain activity in non-communicative patients, including those in vegetative states. Spatial navigation and motor imagery were shown to be the most robust paradigms for this purpose. Building on this established approach, we developed a lateralized adaptation specifically designed for future investigation of split-brain patients whose disconnected hemispheres offer a rare experimental window into the nature of consciousness. In this task, we replaced auditory cues with lateralized visual stimuli to probe the content of the imagery. A tennis racket or a house image was flashed for 120 ms to either the left or right visual field, followed by an imagery period requiring sustained motor (tennis) or spatial navigation (house) imagery. As a validation step, we scanned 25 neurologically healthy participants to determine whether this modified paradigm reliably evokes activity in expected brain regions of interest in a subject-specific manner. Here we present results from this validation study in healthy controls, showing expected activation patterns within canonical regions of interest during motor and spatial imagery, though the strength and extent of these effects varied across participants and visual field conditions. This approach opens an exciting avenue for probing the nature of consciousness in the divided brain by investigating whether a lateralized cue can effectively engage the contralateral hemisphere in the mental imagery task and whether the hemispheres will correlate in their activation patterns following the same probe.

Topic Area: THINKING: Other