Dataset Information

The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception.

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.

SUBMITTER: Pearson J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2519957 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception.

Pearson Joel J Clifford Colin W G CW Tong Frank F

Current biology : CB 20080626 13

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 fac ...[more]

PMID: 18583132

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Project description:In several behavioral psycholinguistic studies, it has been shown that concrete words are processed more efficiently. They can be remembered faster, recognized better, and can be learned easier than abstract words. This fact is called concreteness effect. There are fMRI studies which compared the neural representations of concrete and abstract concepts in terms of activated regions. In the present study, a comparison has been made between the condition-specific connectivity of functional networks (obtained by group ICA) during imagery of abstract and concrete words. The obtained results revealed that the functional network connectivity between three pairs of networks during concrete imagery is significantly different from that of abstract imagery (FDR correction at the significance level of 0.05). These results suggest that abstract and concrete concepts have different representations in terms of functional network connectivity pattern. Remarkably, in all of these network pairs, the connectivity during concrete imagery is significantly higher than that of abstract imagery. These more coherent networks include both linguistic and visual regions with a higher engagement of the right hemisphere, so the results are in line with dual coding theory. Additionally, these three pairs of networks include the contrasting regions which have shown stronger activation either in concrete or abstract word processing in former studies. The findings imply that the brain is more integrated and synchronized at the time of concrete imagery and it may explain the reason of faster concrete words processing. In order to validate the results, we used functional network connectivity distributions (FNCD). Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used to check if the abstract and concrete FNCDs extracted from whole subjects are the same. The result revealed that the corresponding distributions are different which indicates two different patterns of connectivity for abstract and concrete word processing. Also, the mean of FNCD is significantly higher at the time of concrete imagery than that of abstract imagery. Furthermore, FNCDs at the single-subject level are significantly more left-skewed or equally, include more strong connectivity for concrete imagery.

Dataset Information

The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception.

Publications

The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception.

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