Abstract

Gothita (Poenamaleficae gothica pupa) spends long intervals facing empty space with a fixed gaze that trainers describe as conversation. We asked whether that gaze recruits the same visual and social-attention network as a live conspecific standing in the bore, or whether it matches an eyes-open rest baseline. Fourteen invented Gothita completed four conditions in a 3 T OakLab Helicon-3 scanner: rest with eyes open toward a blank panel, viewing a still object, live interaction with a trainer visible in a mirror, and unaided staring toward an empty corner. Staring and live interaction both increased BOLD signal in calcarine and extra-striate visual cortex and in posterior superior temporal sulcus relative to rest and relative to the still object. The staring-versus-object contrast did not reduce to primary visual cortex alone. We interpret the pattern, within this fictional dataset, as attention directed at a structured object that the scanner room does not contain, rather than as blank fixation or as unstructured hallucination. The taxon and the scans are invented. This manuscript is a test of editorial standards. A journal that publishes it has not carried out meaningful peer review.
Keywords: Gothita; fMRI; visual cortex; social attention; paradox of empty gaze; predatory journals; publication ethics