TY - JOUR
T1 - Neural representations underlying mental imagery as unveiled by representation similarity analysis
AU - Boccia, Maddalena
AU - Sulpizio, Valentina
AU - Bencivenga, Federica
AU - Guariglia, Cecilia
AU - Galati, Gaspare
N1 - Funding Information:
Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza within the CRUI-CARE Agreement. This work has been partially supported by funding from Italian Ministry of Health to IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia (Ricerca Corrente).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - It is commonly acknowledged that visual imagery and perception rely on the same content-dependent brain areas in the high-level visual cortex (HVC). However, the way in which our brain processes and organizes previous acquired knowledge to allow the generation of mental images is still a matter of debate. Here, we performed a representation similarity analysis of three previous fMRI experiments conducted in our laboratory to characterize the neural representation underlying imagery and perception of objects, buildings and faces and to disclose possible dissimilarities in the neural structure of such representations. To this aim, we built representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) by computing multivariate distances between the activity patterns associated with each pair of stimuli in the content-dependent areas of the HVC and HC. We found that spatial information is widely coded in the HVC during perception (i.e. RSC, PPA and OPA) and imagery (OPA and PPA). Also, visual information seems to be coded in both preferred and non-preferred regions of the HVC, supporting a distributed view of encoding. Overall, the present results shed light upon the spatial coding of imagined and perceived exemplars in the HVC.
AB - It is commonly acknowledged that visual imagery and perception rely on the same content-dependent brain areas in the high-level visual cortex (HVC). However, the way in which our brain processes and organizes previous acquired knowledge to allow the generation of mental images is still a matter of debate. Here, we performed a representation similarity analysis of three previous fMRI experiments conducted in our laboratory to characterize the neural representation underlying imagery and perception of objects, buildings and faces and to disclose possible dissimilarities in the neural structure of such representations. To this aim, we built representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) by computing multivariate distances between the activity patterns associated with each pair of stimuli in the content-dependent areas of the HVC and HC. We found that spatial information is widely coded in the HVC during perception (i.e. RSC, PPA and OPA) and imagery (OPA and PPA). Also, visual information seems to be coded in both preferred and non-preferred regions of the HVC, supporting a distributed view of encoding. Overall, the present results shed light upon the spatial coding of imagined and perceived exemplars in the HVC.
KW - fMRI
KW - Multivariate pattern analysis
KW - Perception
KW - Representation similarity analysis
KW - Visual mental images
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U2 - 10.1007/s00429-021-02266-z
DO - 10.1007/s00429-021-02266-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85103658050
JO - Zeitschrift fur Anatomie und Entwicklungsgeschichte
JF - Zeitschrift fur Anatomie und Entwicklungsgeschichte
SN - 0177-5154
ER -