Preserved Visual Imagery and Categorization in a Case of Associative Visual Agnosia

1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Jankowiak ◽  
Marcel Kinsbourne ◽  
Ruth S. Shalev ◽  
David L. Bachman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Lateral Inhibition ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Complex Objects ◽  
Visual Agnosia ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
Object Decision ◽  
Actual Stimulus

A patient with associative visual agnosia secondary to a penetrating bitemporooccipital lesion remained able to draw complex objects from memory but could not subsequently recognize his sketches. His retained ability to copy and draw briefly exposed objects indicates that this is not a problem of visual perception. On tasks of categorization, mental imagery, drawing, and object decision, he demonstrates many instances of preserved visual semantic memories and imagery despite a sense of unfamiliarity with the visual stimuli. We infer a preserved ability to derive internal visual images from semantic memory. Cues may help him visualize the named object, which then serves as a model for comparison with the actual stimulus. However, his adequate visual perception and mental visual imagery, even when assisted by cues, are still insufficient to correct fully his difficulty in recognizing objects. Unique to his case is an inability to match the representation of stimulus objects with his intact internal image of the same object. Deficient lateral inhibition between neural representations of similar objects may be responsible.

scholarly journals Auditory and Visual Mental Imagery in Musicians and Nonmusicians

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Talamini ◽  
Julia Vigl ◽  
Elizabeth Doerr ◽  
Massimo Grassi ◽  
Barbara Carretti
Keyword(s):  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Auditory Imagery ◽  
Visual Mental Imagery ◽  
Formally Trained

The present research investigated auditory and visual mental imagery and how this ability differs in people with and without musical training. In a first part, the characteristics of a new auditory imagery self-report questionnaire (the Vividness of Auditory Imagery Questionnaire, VAIQ) were reported. The questionnaire was composed of 16 items assessing mental vividness of auditory everyday sounds and it was administered to 147 participants, demonstrating good psychometric properties. In a second part, self-reported vividness of auditory and visual images was assessed in people with and without music expertise. Thirty-six formally trained musicians, 33 self-taught musicians, and 33 nonmusicians completed the questionnaires. The newly built questionnaire VAIQ and the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Marks, 1973) were administered. Music aptitude and general cognitive abilities were also assessed in all participants as control measures. We observed that both groups of musicians self-reported greater vividness of mental imagery for auditory nonmusical sounds than nonmusicians, but not for visual images. The study confirmed that music expertise is linked to enhanced self-reported auditory mental imagery for everyday sounds, illustrating that such advantage is selective for auditory imagery; no difference concerning visual imagery between the groups of musicians and nonmusicians emerged.

scholarly journals Shared neural mechanisms of visual perception and imagery

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadine Dijkstra ◽  
Sander Erik Bosch ◽  
Marcel van Gerven
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Frontal Cortex ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Neural Representations

For decades, the extent to which visual imagery relies on similar neural mechanisms as visual perception has been a topic of debate. Here, we review recent neuroimaging studies comparing these two forms of visual experience. Their results suggest that there is large overlap in neural processing during perception and imagery: neural representations of imagined and perceived stimuli are similar in visual, parietal and frontal cortex. Furthermore, perception and imagery seem to rely on similar top-down connectivity. The most prominent difference is the absence of bottom-up processing during imagery. These findings fit well with the idea that imagery and perception rely on similar emulation or prediction processes.

scholarly journals Visual Imagery Facilitates Visual Perception: Psychophysical Evidence

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alumit Ishai ◽  
Dov Sagi
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Detection Threshold ◽  
Facilitatory Effect ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Lateral Masking ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
Pictorial Representations

Visual imagery is the invention or recreation of a perceptual experience in the absence of retinal input.The degree to which the same neural representations are involved in both visual imagery and visual perception is unclear. Previous studies have shown that visual imagery interferes with perception (Perky effect). We report here psychophysical data showing a direct facilitatory effect of visual imagery on visual perception. Using a lateral masking detection paradigm of a Gabor target, flanked by peripheral Gabor masks, observers performed imagery tasks that were preceded by perceptual tasks. We found that both perceived and imaginary flanking masks can reduce contrast detection threshold. At short target-to-mask distances imagery induced a threshold reduction of 50% as compared with perception, while at long target-to-mask distances imagery and perception had similar facilitatory effect. The imagery-induced facilitation was specific to the orientation of the stimulus, as well as to the eye used in the task. These data indicate the existence of a stimulus-specific short-term memory system that stores the sensory trace and enables reactivation of quasi-pictorial representations by topdown processes. We suggest that stimulus parameters dominate the imagery-induced facilitation at short target-to-mask distances, yet the topdown component contributes to the effect at long target-to-mask distances.

scholarly journals Ways of Seeing Christ the Judge: The Iconography of Christ III and its Visual Context

Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Jones
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Visual Context ◽  
Notable Feature ◽  
The World ◽  
Dual Perspective ◽  
The Mind

AbstractThis article examines the iconographic programme of the Last Judgement scene depicted in Christ III. A notable feature of the poem’s detailed visual programme is the way in which it provides the audience with a single, panoramic vision that encompasses the divergent perspectives of the blessed and the damned. It is on account of this dual perspective that the poem, through its precise use of language and imagery, presents the audience with a bifocal vision of Christ as King of Kings and Judge of the World, in keeping with the words of Revelation 19:16. A detailed analysis of the poem’s imagery, however, suggests that its portrait of Christ as Judge is not only informed by scripture and exegetical sources, but is also indebted to contemporary visual imagery, particularly the depiction of Christ as Majestas Domini, or Christ in Majesty. As a result, and by approaching the poem’s imagery from an iconological perspective, it is argued that the poet of Christ III had a detailed knowledge of contemporary Christological motifs. Furthermore, a careful analysis of the language used to describe the Judgement scene, and particularly the depiction of Christ as Judge, suggests that the poet intentionally seeks to evoke a range of specific visual images in the mind of his audience in order to amplify the poem’s instructive and penitential aims.

Efficacy of Mental Imagery in Enhancing Mental Rehearsal of Motor Skills

1982 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Dean Ryan ◽  
Jeff Simons
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Style ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Motor Skills ◽  
Motor Performance ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Single Session ◽  
Physical Practice ◽  
Mental Rehearsal ◽  
Learning Improvement ◽  
Better Than

To investigate the mental imagery aspect of mental rehearsal, 80 male traffic officers from the California Highway Patrol learned a novel balancing task during a single session. Based on a pretest questionnaire, subjects were categorized as imagers, nonimagers, or occasional imagers and assigned to one of six groups accordingly: imagers asked to use imagery in mental rehearsal, imagers asked to try not to use imagery, nonimagers asked not to use imagery, nonimagers asked to try to use imagery, physical practice, or no practice. It was hypothesized that a person's preferred cognitive style would prove most effective for use in mental rehearsal and that using another style would cause a decrement in learning. Improvement scores indicated no differences between subjects who initially reported typically using imagery and those reported typically not using it, but groups asked to use imagery in mental rehearsal were superior to those asked not to (p<.001). Overall, physical practice was better than the grouped mental rehearsal conditions, and both were better than no practice. Subjects reporting strong visual imagery were superior to those with weak visual images (p<.03), and those reporting strong kinesthetic imagery were superior to those with weak kinesthetic images (p<.03). Regardless of one's typical cognitive style, the use of vivid imagery appears quite important for enhancement of motor performance through mental rehearsal.

scholarly journals Multiple-domain dissociation between impaired visual perception and preserved mental imagery in a patient with bilateral extrastriate lesions

1998 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Bartolomeo ◽  
Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Lévi ◽  
Beatrice De Gelder ◽  
Gianfranco Denes ◽  
Gianfranco Dalla Barba ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Multiple Domain

scholarly journals EXPRESS: Embodied Mental Imagery Improves Memory

2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110092
Author(s):  
Quentin Marre ◽  
Nathalie Huet ◽  
Elodie Labeye
Keyword(s):  
Motor Imagery ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Memory Efficiency ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Emotional Systems

According to embodied cognition theory, cognitive processes are grounded in sensory, motor and emotional systems. This theory supports the idea that language comprehension and access to memory are based on sensorimotor mental simulations, which does indeed explain experimental results for visual imagery. These results show that word memorization is improved when the individual actively simulates the visual characteristics of the object to be learned. Very few studies, however, have investigated the effectiveness of more embodied mental simulations, that is, simulating both the sensory and motor aspects of the object (i.e., motor imagery) from a first-person perspective. The recall performances of 83 adults were analysed in four different conditions: mental rehearsal, visual imagery, third-person motor imagery, and first-person motor imagery. Results revealed a memory efficiency gradient running from low-embodiment strategies (i.e., involving poor perceptual and/or motor simulation) to high-embodiment strategies (i.e., rich simulation in the sensory and motor systems involved in interactions with the object). However, the benefit of engaging in motor imagery, as opposed to purely visual imagery, was only observed when participants adopted the first-person perspective. Surprisingly, visual and motor imagery vividness seemed to play a negligible role in this effect of the sensorimotor grounding of mental imagery on memory efficiency.

scholarly journals Shared and Independent Neural Representation Between Visual Perception and Mental Imagery

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yingying Huang ◽  
Frank Pollick ◽  
Ming Liu ◽  
Delong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Neural Representation ◽  
Gabor Features ◽  
Visual Areas ◽  
Neural Substrate ◽  
Early Visual Cortex ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Visual mental imagery and visual perception have been shown to share a hierarchical topological visual structure of neural representation. Meanwhile, many studies have reported a dissociation of neural substrate between mental imagery and perception in function and structure. However, we have limited knowledge about how the visual hierarchical cortex involved into internally generated mental imagery and perception with visual input. Here we used a dataset from previous fMRI research (Horikawa & Kamitani, 2017), which included a visual perception and an imagery experiment with human participants. We trained two types of voxel-wise encoding models, based on Gabor features and activity patterns of high visual areas, to predict activity in the early visual cortex (EVC, i.e., V1, V2, V3) during perception, and then evaluated the performance of these models during mental imagery. Our results showed that during perception and imagery, activities in the EVC could be independently predicted by the Gabor features and activity of high visual areas via encoding models, which suggested that perception and imagery might share neural representation in the EVC. We further found that there existed a Gabor-specific and a non-Gabor-specific neural response pattern to stimuli in the EVC, which were shared by perception and imagery. These findings provide insight into mechanisms of how visual perception and imagery shared representation in the EVC.

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