Reading the mind's eye: decoding category information during mental imagery
By Leila Reddy, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Thomas Serre. NeuroImage, 2009
301 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Category information for visually presented objects can be read out from multi-voxel patterns of fMRI activity in ventral temporal cortex. What is the nature and reliability of these patterns in the absence of any bottom-up visual input, for example, during visual imagery? Here, we first ask how well category information can be decoded for imagined objects, and then compare the representations evoked during imagery and actual viewing. In an fMRI study, four object categories were either visually presented to subjects, or imagined by them. Using pattern classification techniques we could reliably decode category information (including for non-special categories, i.e., food and tools) from ventral temporal cortex in both conditions, but only during actual viewing from retinotopic areas. Interestingly, in temporal cortex when the classifier was trained on the viewed condition and tested on the imagined condition, or vice-versa, classification performance was comparable to within the imagined condition. The above results held even when we did not use information in the specialized category-selective areas. Thus, the patterns of representation during imagery and actual viewing are in fact surprisingly similar to each other. Consistent with this observation, the maps of “diagnostic voxels” (i.e., the classifier weights) for the perception and imagery classifiers were more similar in ventral temporal cortex than in retinotopic cortex. These results suggest that in the absence of any bottom-up input cortical back projections can selectively re-activate specific patterns of neural activity.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d2a60c28ff7acaa0032751b7a467b3f6e355a00
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies (2011, unknown): “One recent study showed that BOLD signals elicited by visual imagery are more prominent in ventral-temporal visual areas than in early visual areas [44].”
- How concepts are encoded in the human brain: A modality independent, category-based cortical organization of semantic knowledge (2016, background): “Semantic discrimination across modalities in sighted subjects, though, may be related to common sensory features sustained by visually-based perceptual or imagery processes (Reddy et al., 2010).”
- Encoding and decoding in fMRI (2010, unknown): “, 2008) and imagery (Reddy et al., 2010; Stokes et al., 2009).”
- A voxel-wise encoding model for early visual areas decodes mental images of remembered scenes (2014, unknown): “MVPC studies that targeted high-order visual areas have shown similarity between activity patterns in those visual areas as well (Stokes et al., 2009; Reddy et al., 2010; Johnson and Johnson, 2014).”
- Object-Specific Semantic Coding in Human Perirhinal Cortex (2014, result): “Our results also replicated object category effects robustly seen in MVPA studies (Haxby et al., 2001; Cox and Savoy, 2003; Pietrini et al., 2004; Kriegeskorte et al., 2008b; Reddy et al., 2010).”