Visual hallucinations occur when our conscious experience does not accurately reflect external reality. However, these dissociations also regularly occur when we imagine the world around us in the absence of visual stimulation. We used two novel behavioural paradigms to objectively measure visual hallucinations and voluntary mental imagery in 19 individuals with Parkinson's disease (ten with vi...

The existence of hemispheric lateralization of visual mental imagery remains controversial. In light of the literature, we used fMRI to test whether processing of mental images of object drawings preferentially engages the left hemisphere to compared non-object drawings. An equivalent comparison was also made while participants actually perceived object and non-object drawings. Although these t...

This study examined the effects of meditation on mental imagery, evaluating Buddhist monks' reports concerning their extraordinary imagery skills. Practitioners of Buddhist meditation were divided into two groups according to their preferred meditation style: Deity Yoga (focused attention on an internal visual image) or Open Presence (evenly distributed attention, not directed to any particular...

Despite mental imagery's ubiquitous role in human perception, cognition and behavior, one standout question remains unanswered: Why does imagery vary so much from one individual to the next? Here, we used a behavioral paradigm that measures the functional impact of a mental image on subsequent conscious perception and related these measures to the anatomy of the early visual cortex estimated by...

Visual Images as a Motivational Bridge to Pro-Environmental Behaviour: A Cognitive Approach Christine Boomsma Communicating climate change and other long-term environmental issues to the wider public is a challenging process involving many barriers to action. Visualisations have the ability to overcome these barriers. Furthermore, the benefits of visual images over verbal information have been ...

Despite considerable research on the learning of simple motor acts (e.g., finger tapping), we know relatively little about the changes that occur in higher order representations of complex motor skills as expertise develops (Annett, 1995; Colley, 1989; Holding, 1989; Jeannerod, 1994; MacKay, 1989; Rosenbaum, Inhoff, & Gordon, 1984; Schmidt, 1988). In the present study, the relation between the ...

The functional mechanisms and the neural correlates of visual mental imagery (the faculty whereby we can use our "mind's eye" to visualize objects in their absence) are at the centre of a lively debate in cognitive neuroscience. Neurocognitive models have proposed a functional equivalence between visual perception and visual mental imagery, which would be subserved by common neural substrates, ...

Recent studies indicate that covert mental activities, such as simulating a motor action and imagining the shape of an object, involve shared neural representations with actual motor performance and with visual perception, respectively. Here we investigate the performance, by normal individual and subjects with a selective impairment in either motor or visual imagery, of an imagery task involvi...

The Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale (SUIS) is used to measure the tendency to use visual mental imagery in daily life. Its psychometric properties were evaluated in three independent samples (total N = 1297). We evaluated the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the questionnaire. We also examined the structure of the items using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Mor...