ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.)2026
A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex.
Article in Science (New York, N.Y.), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- A neuronal basis for mental imagery.Cell research · 2026Article
- Neural dynamics underlying minute-timescale persistent behaviour in the human brain.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Computational mechanisms transforming visual codes into sparse representations.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2026Review
- A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Computational single-neuron mechanisms of visual object coding in the human temporal lobe.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Why do we need imagination-reality monitoring?Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Article
- A neural computational framework for face processing in the human temporal lobe.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- μετὰ τὰ ϕυσικά: Vision Far Beyond Physics.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
- Update of
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Mental imagery allows us to remember previous experiences and imagine new ones. Animal studies have yielded rich insight into mechanisms for visual perception, but the neural mechanisms for visual imagery remain poorly understood. We determined that approximately 80% of visually responsive single neurons in the human ventral temporal cortex (VTC) use a distributed axis code to represent objects. We used that code to reconstruct objects and generate maximally effective synthetic stimuli. We then recorded responses from the same neural population while subjects imagined specific objects; about 40% of axis-tuned VTC neurons recapitulated the visual code. Our findings reveal that visual imagery is supported by reactivation of the same neurons involved in perception, providing single-neuron evidence for the existence of a generative model in human VTC.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What 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.