Visual imagery: an investigation of its neural and computational basis

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How do we experience the visual appearance of an object when we conjure up its image in the mind's eye? Visual imagery is key to many human activities, such as learning, reminiscing and planning. Accordingly, this cognitive ability has elicited long-standing interest and debate in neuroscience and psychology. Yet, the precise mechanisms by which imagery is carried out at the neural level remain to be elucidated. The overarching goal of the current proposal is to develop a neurocomputational account of visual imagery. Specifically, the current proposal aims to answer a number of fundamental challenges in the field. First, it seeks to clarify where and how visual imagery unfolds over time in the human brain. Second, it aims to describe the detailed content of imagery experiences and visualize it based on neural data. And third, it seeks to develop a computational model able to account for visual imagery and its relationship with visual perception. Of note, this work aims to develop novel methodology for neural-based image reconstruction in order to recover the content of imagery representations (e.g., visualizing the appearance of a friend's face as recovered from memory or that of an imagined letter string). The aims above will be pursued primarily within the areas of face and visual word recognition, given their relevance and utility to the study of imagery and perception. This work will rely on a combination of psychophysical testing, computational modeling (i.e., deep neural networks) and neuroimaging, specifically functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), in healthy adults. The work outlined above has the potential to place the study of visual imagery on a novel computational footing. Theoretically, this work can deepen our understanding of neural mechanisms for visual cognition. Methodologically, it furthers the development of analytical tools for neural data decoding and for neural-based image reconstruction. Practically, it lays the groundwork for a novel mode of interpersonal communication relying on neural read-outs of visual imagery (e.g., sharing an individual's mental impression by the conversion of corresponding neural data into a visual display).