ReviewNature reviews. Neuroscience2019
The human imagination: the cognitive neuroscience of visual mental imagery.
Review in Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 222 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
222 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Mental imagery of suicide and non-suicidal self-injury: A meta-analysis and systematic review.Clinical psychology review · 2023Pooled it
- Dopamine, motor imagery, and proprioception: a neurochemical probe into the perception-imagery debate.Psychological research · 2025Trial
- Effects of five-minutes music intervention on college students' memory.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Impact of meditation on brain age derived from multimodal neuroimaging in experts and older adults from a randomized trial.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Identification of an intrusive-hypervigilant phenotype of posttraumatic stress symptoms with unique stress peptide and amygdala functional connectivity profiles.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Medial temporal default mode network selectively encodes autobiographical visual imagery.Science advances · 2026Article
- Tetrix: A novel Tetris-based paradigm for neuroimaging research and clinical applications.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Deep Learning for Ear-EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface: A Systematic Comparison and Design Insights.Biosensors · 2026Article
- The oblique effect in visual working memory is enhanced by distraction, regardless of tDCS manipulations.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- An Exploratory Investigation of the Influence of Setting and Meaning on Emotion Responses to Virtual Reality Environments.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Mental image vividness and aphantasia judgements are fundamentally compromised by overlooked definition problems.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Conscious and nonconscious thought: Insights from the neuroscience of decision-making.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Predicting visual mental imagery: structural and transcriptomic signatures in the human brain.Communications biology · 2026Article
- The perspective-simulating mind: internal representations in moral judgment and action.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The spatially guided cocktail party effect shapes contralateral neural synchronization.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Stable Diffusion Models Reveal a Persisting Human-AI Gap in Visual Creativity.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- MIRAGE: Robust multi-modal architectures translate fMRI-to-image models from vision to mental imagery.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Patterns of Language and Visuospatial Lateralisation and Cognitive Ability in Young Children Aged 4-7 Years.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Neural Mechanisms of Bidirectional Visuo-Linguistic Transformation in Interactive Communication.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Imagery: Interference, facilitation, and theory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Review
162 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mental imagery can be advantageous, unnecessary and even clinically disruptive. With methodological constraints now overcome, research has shown that visual imagery involves a network of brain areas from the frontal cortex to sensory areas, overlapping with the default mode network, and can function much like a weak version of afferent perception. Imagery vividness and strength range from completely absent (aphantasia) to photo-like (hyperphantasia). Both the anatomy and function of the primary visual cortex are related to visual imagery. The use of imagery as a tool has been linked to many compound cognitive processes and imagery plays both symptomatic and mechanistic roles in neurological and mental disorders and treatments.
Indexed as
Identifiers
31384033What OpenQuestion holds
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.