Generative Feedback Explains Distinct Brain Activity Codes for Seen and Mental Images.

ABSTRACT: The relationship between mental imagery and vision is a long-standing problem in neuroscience. Currently, it is not known whether differences between the activity evoked during vision and reinstated during imagery reflect different codes for seen and mental images. To address this problem, we modeled mental imagery in the human brain as feedback in a hierarchical generative network. Such networks synthesize images by feeding abstract representations from higher to lower levels of the network hierarchy. When higher processing levels are less sensitive to stimulus variation than lower processing levels, as in the human brain, activity in low-level visual areas should encode variation in mental images with less precision than seen images. To test this prediction, we conducted an fMRI experime

SUBMITTER: Breedlove JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10230322 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature