The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception.

Full Abstract

Mental imagery has been proposed to contribute to a variety of high-level cognitive functions, including memory encoding and retrieval, navigation, spatial planning, and even social communication and language comprehension. However, it is debated whether mental imagery relies on the same sensory representations as perception, and if so, what functional consequences such an overlap might have on perception itself. We report novel evidence that single instances of imagery can have a pronounced facilitatory influence on subsequent conscious perception. Either seeing or imagining a specific pattern could strongly bias which of two competing stimuli reach awareness during binocular rivalry. Effects of imagery and perception were location and orientation specific, accumulated in strength over time, and survived an intervening visual task lasting several seconds prior to presentation of the rivalry display. Interestingly, effects of imagery differed from those of feature-based attention. The results demonstrate that imagery, in the absence of any incoming visual signals, leads to the formation of a short-term sensory trace that can bias future perception, suggesting a means by which high-level processes that support imagination and memory retrieval may shape low-level sensory representations.

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Author information

Author/s: Pearson, Joel (J); Clifford, Colin W G (CW); Tong, Frank (F);

Affiliation: Vanderbilt Vision Research Center and Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37203, USA. joel.pearson(-atsign-)vanderbilt.edu

Grants: R01 EY017082 (Agency:United States NEI) ; R01 EY14202 (Agency:United States NEI)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Current biology : CB (Curr Biol), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Jul; vol 18 (issue 13) : pp 982-6

Dates: Created 2008/07/08; Completed 2008/10/03;

PMID: 18583132, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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