ArticleCognition2021
Mistaking imagination for reality: Congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection.
Article in Cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Altered Effective Connectivity of Precuneus Subregions and Associated Gene Profiles in Chronic Insomnia Disorder Patients Before and After Treatment.Brain and behavior · 2026Trial
- Mental image vividness and aphantasia judgements are fundamentally compromised by overlooked definition problems.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Imagery: Interference, facilitation, and theory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Review
- Gaze patterns during visual mental imagery reflect part-based generation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Reinstating motivational states: Electrical signatures of craving and neural mind reading.PloS one · 2026Article
- Do you see what I see? Linking involuntary nonretinal (phantom) vision and mental imagery in aphantasia.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Viewed touch influences tactile detection by altering decision criterion.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Confidence ratings do not distinguish imagination from reality.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- On the relationship between foveal mask interference and mental imagery in peripheral object recognition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Working memory signals in early visual cortex are present in weak and strong imagers.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Introspective inference counteracts perceptual distortion.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Measuring imagery strength in schizophrenia: no evidence of enhanced mental imagery priming.Brain and behavior · 2023Article
- The traces of imagination: early attention bias toward positively imagined stimuli.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Subjective signal strength distinguishes reality from imagination.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Article
- Modelling perception as a hierarchical competition differentiates imagined, veridical, and hallucinated percepts.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Article
- Imagery adds stimulus-specific sensory evidence to perceptual detection.Journal of vision · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Visual experiences can be triggered externally, by signals coming from the outside world during perception; or internally, by signals from memory during mental imagery. Imagery and perception activate similar neural codes in sensory areas, suggesting that they might sometimes be confused. In the current study, we investigated whether imagery influences perception by instructing participants to imagine gratings while externally detecting these same gratings at threshold. In a series of three experiments, we showed that imagery led to a more liberal criterion for reporting stimulus presence, and that this effect was both independent of expectation and stimulus-specific. Furthermore, participants with more vivid imagery were generally more likely to report the presence of external stimuli, independent of condition. The results can be explained as either a low-level sensory or a high-level decision-making effect. We discuss that the most likely explanation is that during imagery, internally generated sensory signals are sometimes confused for perception and suggest how the underlying mechanisms can be further characterized in future research. Our findings show that imagery and perception interact and emphasize that internally and externally generated signals are combined in complex ways to determine conscious perception.
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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.