Perceived and mentally rotated contents are differentially represented in cortical depth of V1.

ABSTRACT: Primary visual cortex (V1) in humans is known to represent both veridically perceived external input and internally-generated contents underlying imagery and mental rotation. However, it is unknown how the brain keeps these contents separate thus avoiding a mixture of the perceived and the imagined which could lead to potentially detrimental consequences. Inspired by neuroanatomical studies showing that feedforward and feedback connections in V1 terminate in different cortical layers, we hypothesized that this anatomical compartmentalization underlies functional segregation of external and internally-generated visual contents, respectively. We used high-resolution layer-specific fMRI to test this hypothesis in a mental rotation task. We found that rotated contents were predominant at outer

SUBMITTER: Iamshchinina P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8440580 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature