Gambling is a serious problem that affects the individual as well as the whole society. Multiple studies have investigated the effect of imagery tasks on gambling behavior. Whiting and Dixon (2013) investigated the effect of a gambling-related imagery task verses a laundry-related imagery task on gambling behavior. The current study extended Whiting and Dixon’s findings by comparing different outcome-specific imagery tasks on gambling behavior. The study included two groups: 1) winning imagery group (n=7), and 2) losing imagery group (n=7). Participants in the winning imagery group imagined themselves winging for 15 trials, while participants in the losing imagery group imagined themselves losing for 15 trials. Then both groups were given the opportunity to play a game of blackjack downloaded on a laptop for as long as they desired. Gambling intensity was measured by the total time played and the number of trials played. The Participants in the winning imagery group gambled significantly longer (p= 0.01) and played significantly more trials (p= 0.03) than those in the losing imagery group. Implications for pathological gambling treatment are discussed.

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OBJECTIVE: Prior surgical studies have established functional neuroimaging as a validated method to examine brain activation patterns as well as distinctions between novice and expert surgeons during physical skills in surgery. The purpose of this study is to examine brain activation during cognitive surgical tasks. Our study utilizes simulated operative dictations to determine which brain regions are activated by this task and to distinguish different levels of expertise. METHODS: Junior residents (PGY 1-3), senior residents (PGY 4-5), and attendings were recruited for this study. Demographic questions and case characteristics were obtained. Participants sat in a quiet room and baseline measurements were taken. Then, they were tasked to perform a simulated operative dictation of a routine, open inguinal hernia repair utilizing the Lichtenstein technique. Three trials were completed with a two-minute rest between repetitions. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure brain activation during salient events of the operative dictation. Optode montage (developed during preliminary testing) covered prefrontal, occipital, and sensorimotor regions. Measurement of the fluctuations in deoxyhemoglobin and oxyhemoglobin concentrations during the cognitive task was obtained for each participant. Homer3 and AtlasViewer toolboxes were used to process raw data and changes in deoxygenated hemoglobin were evaluated relative to baseline. A general linear model (p < 0.05 and q < 0.05) was used to evaluate group-level differences. RESULTS: Ten participants were recruited for each group. Areas of increased and decreased brain activation were identified. Senior residents had significantly more activation in premotor areas, including supplementary motor area, parietal area, and right frontal area, compared to junior residents. Attendings demonstrated significantly less brain activation in medial frontal areas compared to the both junior and senior residents. CONCLUSION: Functional neuroimaging can examine cognitive functions during simulated operative dictations (a cognitive surgical task) and discern differences for various levels of expertise. This study is the first to connect mental imagery to neuroimaging analysis of cognitive function.

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Denna uppsats skrevs i syfte att undersöka den påverkan som visualisering har på riskbedömning och affekt, samt sambandet mellan affekt och riskbedömning. Fyra hypoteser testades: 1. Riskskattning vid visualisering förväntades ge högre riskskattningar än utan visualisering.  2. De som visualiserade förväntades ha mer negativ sinnesstämning än de som inte visualiserade. 3. Det förväntades finnas ett samband mellan negativ sinnesstämning och hög riskskattning. 4. Kvinnor förväntades skatta risk högre än män. Beräkningarna baseras på 347 enkäter insamlade bland studenter inom beteendevetenskapliga ämnen. Skillnaderna i riskskattning visade sig finnas i enlighet med hypotes mellan de som instruerades att visualisera och de som enbart skattade riskerna utan specifika instruktioner. Dock fanns ingen signifikant skillnad mellan visualiserings- och resoneringsinstruktioner eller mellan resoneringsinstruktioner och de utan specifika instruktioner. Ingen signifikant skillnad fanns gällande sinnesstämning. En svag korrelation fanns mellan negativ sinnesstämning och riskskattning. Riskskattningen visade sig vara högre bland kvinnorna än männen. Visualiseringsinstruktioner verkar påverka riskbedömningar i negativ riktning. Dock så fanns inte den skillnad mellan visualisering och resonerande som funnits i en tidigare studie. Angående könsskillnader vid riskbedömning ligger denna studie i linje med tidigare forskning. Det svaga sambandet mellan sinnesstämning och riskskattning pekar på att måendet och riskbedömning hänger ihop men att visualisering inte leder till ett rent användande av affektheuristik. Fler studier behövs för att förstå sambandet mellan visualisering, sinnesstämning och riskbedömning. / The purpose of this paper is to examine risk judgement and affect when using mental imagery. Four hypotheses were tested; 1. Risk judgement was expected to be higher when using mental imagery than without using mental imagery. 2. Participants who used mental imagery were expected to have a more negative mood than the ones who didn’t use mental imagery. 3. A negative correlation between mood and risk judgement was expected. 4. Women were hypothesized to give higher risk ratings than men. Calculations were made using 347 surveys from students of behavioral sciences. The hypothesized difference in risk judgement when using mental imagery was found between participants instructed to use mental imagery and those without specific instructions. However no difference was found between mental imagery instructions and reasoning instructions, or between reasoning and no instructions. No significant difference was found for mood.  A weak correlation was found between negative mood and risk judgement. Women rated risks higher than men. Both risk judgement and mood seem to be influenced negatively by mental imagery. However the difference between instructions of mental imagery and reasoning that was found in an earlier study was not present here. The sex differences were consistent with earlier studies. The weak correlation between risk judgement and mood found in this study tells us that the two are connected but mental imagery doesn’t seem to lead to usage of affect heuristics. More studies are needed to understand the connection between mental imagery, mood and risk judgement.

Mental imagery presents humans with the opportunity to predict prospective happenings based on own intended actions, to reminisce occurrences from the past and reproduce the perceptual experience. This cognitive capability is mandatory for human survival in this folding and changing world. By means of internal representation, mental imagery offers other cognitive functions (e.g., decision making, planning) the possibility to assess information on objects or events that are not being perceived. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that humans are able to employ this ability in the early stages of infancy. Although materialisation of humanoid robot employment in the future appears to be promising, comprehensive research on mental imagery in these robots is lacking. Working within a human environment required more than a set of pre-programmed actions. This thesis aims to investigate the use of mental imagery in humanoid robots, which could be used to serve the demands of their cognitive skills as in humans. Based on empirical data and neuro-imaging studies on mental imagery, the thesis proposes a novel neurorobotic framework which proposes to facilitate humanoid robots to exploit mental imagery. Through conduction of a series of experiments on mental rotation and tool use, the results from this study confirm this potential. Chapters 5 and 6 detail experiments on mental rotation that investigate a bio-constrained neural network framework accounting for mental rotation processes. They are based on neural mechanisms involving not only visual imagery, but also affordance encoding, motor simulation, and the anticipation of the visual consequences of actions. The proposed model is in agreement with the theoretical and empirical research on mental rotation. The models were validated with both a simulated and physical humanoid robot (iCub), engaged in solving a typical mental rotation task. The results show that the model is able to solve a typical mental rotation task and in agreement with data from psychology experiments, they also show response times linearly dependent on the angular disparity between the objects. Furthermore, the experiments in chapter 6 propose a novel neurorobotic model that has a macro-architecture constrained by knowledge on brain, which encompasses a rather general mental rotation mechanism and incorporates a biologically plausible decision making mechanism. The new model is tested within the humanoid robot iCub in tasks requiring to mentally rotate 2D geometrical images appearing on a computer screen. The results show that the robot has an enhanced capacity to generalize mental rotation of new objects and shows the possible effects of overt movements of the wrist on mental rotation. These results indicate that the model represents a further step in the identification of the embodied neural mechanisms that might underlie mental rotation in humans and might also give hints to enhance robots' planning capabilities. In Chapter 7, the primary purpose for conducting the experiment on tool use development through computational modelling refers to the demonstration that developmental characteristics of tool use identified in human infants can be attributed to intrinsic motivations. Through the processes of sensorimotor learning and rewarding mechanisms, intrinsic motivations play a key role as a driving force that drives infants to exhibit exploratory behaviours, i.e., play. Sensorimotor learning permits an emergence of other cognitive functions, i.e., affordances, mental imagery and problem-solving. Two hypotheses on tool use development are also conducted thoroughly. Secondly, the experiment tests two candidate mechanisms that might underlie an ability to use a tool in infants: overt movements and mental imagery. By means of reinforcement learning and sensorimotor learning, knowledge of how to use a tool might emerge through random movements or trial-and-error which might reveal a solution (sequence of actions) of solving a given tool use task accidentally. On the other hand, mental imagery was used to replace the outcome of overt movements in the processes of self-determined rewards. Instead of determining a reward from physical interactions, mental imagery allows the robots to evaluate a consequence of actions, in mind, before performing movements to solve a given tool use task. Therefore, collectively, the case of mental imagery in humanoid robots was systematically addressed by means of a number of neurorobotic models and, furthermore, two categories of spatial problem solving tasks: mental rotation and tool use. Mental rotation evidently involves the employment of mental imagery and this thesis confirms the potential for its exploitation by humanoid robots. Additionally, the studies on tool use demonstrate that the key components assumed and included in the experiments on mental rotation, namely affordances and mental imagery, can be acquired by robots through the processes of sensorimotor learning.

Mental representations can be consciously experienced in mental imagery format, and verbal-linguistic format. Mental imagery representations of emotional information can evoke more powerful emotional responses than verbal-linguistic representations of the same information. Biases in mental imagery-based cognition are postulated to play a role in the maintenance of emotional disturbance in depression. Despite growing research, two questions remain: 1) is dysphoria (mild to moderate depression symptoms) associated with mood-congruent bias in the frequency of mental imagery generation; and 2) are such biases related to state emotional experience and emotional response to emotional information in dysphoria? To examine question one, participants varying in levels of dysphoria reported the occurrence of mental imagery in real time under task contexts that were emotional (negative and positive verbal cues) and unemotional (neutral verbal cues). Mental imagery generation was assessed under two task conditions: a) when participants were instructed to generate mental imagery in response to verbal cues (Study 1 & 2); and b) when participants were not instructed to generate mental imagery (or verbal-linguistic representations) during exposure to similar verbal cues (Study 2, 3, & 4). Results from all studies, across both instruction types, showed that dysphoria was associated with a loss of positive bias in mental representation generation, driven by reduced positive representation generation (Study 1, 2 & 4), but also by elevated negative representation generation (Study 1, 2 & 3). Interestingly, evidence of a loss of positive bias was most consistently observed when given neutral verbal cues, but also when given positive verbal cues. However, such dysphoria-linked effects were not disproportionately evident for mental imagery relative to verbal-linguistic representations, when both were allowed to naturally occur in Study 2, 3, & 4. Unexpectedly, dysphoria was associated with reduced tendency to generate negative imagery relative to negative verbal-linguistic representations in Study 2, though this finding was not replicated in Study 3 or Study 4. To examine question two, participants provided state mood ratings in addition to reporting mental representation occurrence during exposure to auditory emotional information (Study 3: verbal cues; Study 4: news stories). Dysphoria and mental representation generation was found to be unrelated to emotional response on negative trials (Study 3 & 4). However, greater occurrence of mental imagery, but not verbal-linguistic representation generation was related to greater positive emotional response on positive trials for individuals with dysphoria (Study 3), and all participants (Study 4). Study 5 analysed existing clinical trial data and found that the vividness of positive future event imagery is related to optimism in depression, such that those able to envision a brighter future are relatively more optimistic, and regain optimism more quickly, than those less able to do so, even when currently depressed. In summary, dysphoria was associated with loss of positive bias in mental representation generation, though such effects were not unique to imagery. Importantly, greater occurrence of mental imagery-based, but not purely verbal-linguistic, representations were associated with greater positive emotional response to positive information, and may hold value as a target for future translational research.

Yes / According to the theory of predictive processing, understanding in the present involves non-consciously representing the immediate future, based on probabilistic inference shaped by learning from the past. This paper suggests links between this neuroscientific theory and the psychoanalytic concept of reverie–an empathic, containing attentional state–and considers implications for the ways therapists intuit implicit material in their clients. Using findings from a study about therapists’ experiences of this state, we propose that reverie can offer practitioners from diverse theoretical backgrounds a means to enter the predictive moment deeply, making use of its subtle contents to connect with clients.

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Bien que le phénomène de co-Création prenne de l'ampleur dans les pratiques actuelles des entreprises, ces dernières se déclarent souvent déçues par la faible créativité effective des utilisateurs « ordinaires » à générer des idées de nouveaux produits. Ce travail doctoral cherche à répondre au questionnement général suivant : peut-On améliorer l'efficacité des démarches de co-Création avec des utilisateurs ? Si l'identification des utilisateurs créatifs est un enjeu crucial pour les entreprises, il est également essentiel pour ces dernières de faire en sorte de stimuler les capacités créatives des utilisateurs enrôlés dans les processus d'innovation. Cette thèse s'intéresse donc au phénomène d'imagerie mentale qui a souvent été souligné en psychologie pour son implication dans les processus créatifs. Trois études quantitatives explorent la relation entre la capacité individuelle d'imagerie mentale et la capacité créative de sujets. Les résultats obtenus identifient la capacité d'imagerie mentale comme une variable révélatrice de la capacité créative des individus et constituant ainsi un élément possible d'identification des individus créatifs. Une quatrième étude montre qu'il est possible d'agir, par le biais d'instructions d'imaginer mentalement, sur les processus d'imagerie suspectés d'être en œuvre dans les processus créatifs, de manière à améliorer la créativité résultante. Ces résultats mettent en évidence l'imagerie mentale comme un mécanisme sous-Jacent explicatif des processus créatifs. Enfin, une cinquième expérimentation, plus conséquente en matière de variables examinées, étudie l'effet de deux types de stimulations de l'activité d'imagerie, à savoir : la présence d'une stimulation d'imagerie liée à soi (versus non liée à soi) et la présence (versus l'absence) d'un entraînement préalable à l'imagerie mentale. L'étude confirme le rôle médiateur de l'imagerie mentale et met en évidence les effets favorables de ces stimulations sur la quantité, l'originalité, l'utilité perçue et l'attrait des idées produites. Le rôle modérateur de variables individuelles – le caractère lead user et l'implication envers la catégorie de produit – a également été examiné. / Although co-Creation is a phenomenon increasingly present in various business practices, companies are often disappointed by the low effective creativity of "ordinary" users to generate ideas for new products. This doctoral research aims to answer the following general question: Can we improve the effectiveness of co-Creation processes with users? If the identification of creative users is a critical issue for businesses, then it is also essential to ensure stimulation of the creative abilities of the users enrolled in the innovation process. This thesis is interested in mental imagery, a phenomenon that has often been cited in psychology for its implication in the creative process. In this work three quantitative studies explore the relationship between the individual's imagery ability and their creative ability. The obtained results identify the mental imagery ability as a variable indicating the creative ability of individuals and thus constituting a potential element for identifying creative individuals. A fourth study shows that it is possible to impact, via instructions to form mental images, the mental imagery process that is implemented in the creative process, thus improving the resulting creativity. These results highlight mental imagery as an underlying mechanism of the creative process. Finally, a fifth experiment, more consistent in terms of the variables examined, studies the effect of two types of stimulation of imagery activity: self-Related vs. non self-Related imaging stimulation, and the presence vs. absence of mental imagery training. The study confirms the mediator role of mental imagery and highlights the favorable effects of these stimulations on the quantity, originality, perceived usefulness and the customer appeal of the generated ideas. The moderator role of individual variables - leadership and involvement with the product category - was also examined.