Mistaking imagination for reality: Congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection.

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, in

SUBMITTER: Dijkstra N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8164160 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature