Brain meeting: Nadine Dijkstra

Whenever we think about what something looks like that is not there, we use visual imagery. Visual imagery is phenomenologically similar to visual perception: imagining and perceiving a cat both gives rise to the experience of almond-shaped eyes, whiskers and pointy ears. To what extent visual imagery relies on similar neural mechanisms as visual perception has been a topic of debate for decades. During this talk I will present some of our work investigating this question. Our results indicate that imagery and perception rely on similar neural representations in different brain areas and on similar top-down connectivity. The biggest difference between these two forms of visual experience seems to be that the early, bottom-up processing that characterises perception, is absent during imagery. I will discuss the implications of these findings and directions for future research.