The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception.

ABSTRACT: Mental imagery has been proposed to contribute to a variety of high-level cognitive functions, including memory encoding and retrieval, navigation, spatial planning, and even social communication and language comprehension. However, it is debated whether mental imagery relies on the same sensory representations as perception, and if so, what functional consequences such an overlap might have on perception itself. We report novel evidence that single instances of imagery can have a pronounced facilitatory influence on subsequent conscious perception. Either seeing or imagining a specific pattern could strongly bias which of two competing stimuli reach awareness during binocular rivalry. Effects of imagery and perception were location and orientation specific, accumulated in strength over ti

SUBMITTER: Pearson J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2519957 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature