ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Attention driven phantom vision: measuring the sensory strength of attentional templates and their relation to visual mental imagery and aphantasia.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- "The Giant Black Elephant with white Tusks stood in a field of Green Grass": Cognitive and brain mechanisms underlying aphantasia.Consciousness and cognition · 2025Pooled it
- Dissociating voluntary mental imagery and mental simulation: Evidence from aphantasia.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Motor imagery in individuals with congenital aphantasia.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A Systematic Review of Aphantasia: Concept, Measurement, Neural Basis, and Theory Development.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Uncovering the Role of the Early Visual Cortex in Visual Mental Imagery.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Explicit and implicit motor simulations are impaired in individuals with aphantasia.Brain communications · 2024Article
- Subjective signal strength distinguishes reality from imagination.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Is cognitive control of perception and action via attentional focus moderated by motor imagery?BMC psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- Mistaking imagination for reality: Congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection.Cognition · 2021Article
- Offline perception: an introduction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When we search for an object in an array or anticipate attending to a future object, we create an 'attentional template' of the object. The definitions of attentional templates and visual imagery share many similarities as well as many of the same neural characteristics. However, the phenomenology of these attentional templates and their neural similarities to visual imagery and perception are rarely, if ever discussed. Here, we investigate the relationship between these two forms of non-retinal phantom vision through the use of the binocular rivalry technique, which allows us to measure the sensory strength of attentional templates in the absence of concurrent perceptual stimuli. We find that attentional templates correlate with both feature-based attention and visual imagery. Attentional templates, like imagery, were significantly disrupted by the presence of irrelevant visual stimuli, while feature-based attention was not. We also found that a special population who lack the ability to visualize (aphantasia), showed evidence of feature-based attention when measured using the binocular rivalry paradigm, but not attentional templates. Taken together, these data suggest functional similarities between attentional templates and visual imagery, advancing the theory of visual imagery as a general simulation tool used across cognition. This article is part of the theme issue 'Offline perception: voluntary and spontaneous perceptual experiences without matching external stimulation'.
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