ArticleNeuroImage2015
A voxel-wise encoding model for early visual areas decodes mental images of remembered scenes.
Article in NeuroImage, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 101 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
101 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Img2EEG: A Scalable and Interpretable Encoding Framework for Simulating Human EEG Responses to Visual Inputs.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Hippocampal mechanisms underlying the resolution of competition in memory and perception.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Ongoing thoughts at rest reflect functional brain organization and behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Mental image vividness and aphantasia judgements are fundamentally compromised by overlooked definition problems.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Predicting visual mental imagery: structural and transcriptomic signatures in the human brain.Communications biology · 2026Article
- MIRAGE: Robust multi-modal architectures translate fMRI-to-image models from vision to mental imagery.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Article
- A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Vividness of mental imagery reflects a broad range of internally generated visual experiences.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Mental Images from Long-Term Memory Differ from Perception: Evidence for Distinct Spatial Formats and Distinct Mechanisms of Spatial Attention Orientation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Dissociating voluntary mental imagery and mental simulation: Evidence from aphantasia.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Hippocampal-guided reconstruction of an event's prior temporal context.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Early Visual Cortex Supports One-Shot Episodic Memory via Spatially Tuned Reactivation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Domain Adaptation-enhanced searchlight: enabling classification of brain states from visual perception to mental imagery.Brain informatics · 2025Article
- Supramodal and cross-modal representations of working memory in higher-order cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Distinct distributed brain networks dissociate self-generated mental states.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Visual imagery of familiar people and places in category selective cortex.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
41 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Recent multi-voxel pattern classification (MVPC) studies have shown that in early visual cortex patterns of brain activity generated during mental imagery are similar to patterns of activity generated during perception. This finding implies that low-level visual features (e.g., space, spatial frequency, and orientation) are encoded during mental imagery. However, the specific hypothesis that low-level visual features are encoded during mental imagery is difficult to directly test using MVPC. The difficulty is especially acute when considering the representation of complex, multi-object scenes that can evoke multiple sources of variation that are distinct from low-level visual features. Therefore, we used a voxel-wise modeling and decoding approach to directly test the hypothesis that low-level visual features are encoded in activity generated during mental imagery of complex scenes. Using fMRI measurements of cortical activity evoked by viewing photographs, we constructed voxel-wise encoding models of tuning to low-level visual features. We also measured activity as subjects imagined previously memorized works of art. We then used the encoding models to determine if putative low-level visual features encoded in this activity could pick out the imagined artwork from among thousands of other randomly selected images. We show that mental images can be accurately identified in this way; moreover, mental image identification accuracy depends upon the degree of tuning to low-level visual features in the voxels selected for decoding. These results directly confirm the hypothesis that low-level visual features are encoded during mental imagery of complex scenes. Our work also points to novel forms of brain-machine interaction: we provide a proof-of-concept demonstration of an internet image search guided by mental imagery.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.