ArticleBrain structure & function2019
Reconstructing imagined letters from early visual cortex reveals tight topographic correspondence between visual mental imagery and perception.
Article in Brain structure & function, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- The primate claustrum as a hub for precision weighting of prediction errors across the cortical hierarchy.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- MIRAGE: Robust multi-modal architectures translate fMRI-to-image models from vision to mental imagery.PLoS computational biology · 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
- Varieties of imagery and perception: the structure of task differences.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Age-related differences in perceptual and mental imagery abilities.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Individualized functional magnetic resonance imaging neuromodulation enhances visuospatial perception: a proof-of-concept study.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Computational reconstruction of mental representations using human behavior.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Uncovering the Role of the Early Visual Cortex in Visual Mental Imagery.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Working memory signals in early visual cortex are present in weak and strong imagers.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- The role of awareness in shaping responses in human visual cortex.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Article
- Brain-computer interface paradigms and neural coding.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Review
- Autosuggestion: a cognitive process that empowers your brain?Experimental brain research · 2022Review
- Mistaking imagination for reality: Congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection.Cognition · 2021Article
- Cortical hierarchy, dual counterstream architecture and the importance of top-down generative networks.NeuroImage · 2021Review
- Transforming the Concept of Memory Reactivation.Trends in neurosciences · 2020Review
- Article
- Generative Feedback Explains Distinct Brain Activity Codes for Seen and Mental Images.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
- Towards an intuitive communication-BCI: decoding visually imagined characters from the early visual cortex using high-field fMRI.Biomedical physics & engineering express · 2019Article
- Comparison of human population receptive field estimates between scanners and the effect of temporal filtering.F1000Research · 2019Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Visual mental imagery is the quasi-perceptual experience of "seeing in the mind's eye". While a tight correspondence between imagery and perception in terms of subjective experience is well established, their correspondence in terms of neural representations remains insufficiently understood. In the present study, we exploit the high spatial resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 7T, the retinotopic organization of early visual cortex, and machine-learning techniques to investigate whether visual imagery of letter shapes preserves the topographic organization of perceived shapes. Sub-millimeter resolution fMRI images were obtained from early visual cortex in six subjects performing visual imagery of four different letter shapes. Predictions of imagery voxel activation patterns based on a population receptive field-encoding model and physical letter stimuli provided first evidence in favor of detailed topographic organization. Subsequent visual field reconstructions of imagery data based on the inversion of the encoding model further showed that visual imagery preserves the geometric profile of letter shapes. These results open new avenues for decoding, as we show that a denoising autoencoder can be used to pretrain a classifier purely based on perceptual data before fine-tuning it on imagery data. Finally, we show that the autoencoder can project imagery-related voxel activations onto their perceptual counterpart allowing for visually recognizable reconstructions even at the single-trial level. The latter may eventually be utilized for the development of content-based BCI letter-speller systems.
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