Neural Mechanism Of Mental Imagery In Problem Solving

Problem solving is a process of thinking which searches path from the initial stateto the target state in the problem space. Mental imagery plays an import role in theprocess of problem solving. It is necessary to study mental imagery’s neuralmechanism and the information processing in the process of problem for the furthresearch of neural mechanism and the information processing in the process ofproblem solving.In our study, we used the simplified Sudoku as the experiment materials,designedtwo tasks which were the task of problem solving in the condition of split and the taskof problem solving in the condition of no split. The tasks focused on mental imageryin the process of problem solving. To research which regions are involved in mentalimagery in the process of problem, we did confirmatory analysis based on regionscorresponding to models of ACT-R and exploratory analysis based on the globalregions. To research how regions cooperate with each other to execute the mentalimagery task, we did brain functional connectivity analysis.In the confirmatory analysis and exploratory analysis, we found the commonactivated regions which include Left Fusiform Gyrus, Prefrontal Cortex and PosteriorParietal Cortex. Moreover, Posterior Parietal Cortex activated the largest size ofregions among all the activated regions, and it’s value of BOLD response was higherthan any other regions involved in mental imagery. The result is consistent with otherresearchers’ result that the Posterior Parietal Cortex plays an key role in mentalimagery. In the exploratory analysis, we also found some other regions significantactivated except for regions involved in mental imagery in the confirmatory analysis.The activated regions include Supplementary Motor Area, Frontal Eye Field,Occipital Superior Gyrus, Left Cerebellum, Thalamus, Posterior Cingulate Gyrus andventral anterior cingulate cortex.Posterior Parietal Cortex plays an key role in mental imagery. Thus, in thefollowing brain functional connection analysis, we selected Posterior Parietal Cortexas the seed and did brain functional connection analysis between the seed and otherregions. And the result showed that Left Prefrontal Cortex, Left Fusiform Gyrus, LeftCerebellum and Frontal Eye Field strengthened their correlations to Posterior ParietalCortex in the process of mental. In a word, some other regions as well as Posterior Parietal Cortex are involved inmental imagery in the process of problem solving. In the process of mental imagery,Posterior Parietal Cortex is related to problem representation, Cerebellum and FrontalEye Field are related to visual spatial attention, Fusiform Gyrus is related to digitalidentification. They cooperate with each other to execute the mental imagery task.