Media release

From: Society for Neuroscience

How people process mental images versus real-life visuals

The neural mechanisms for orienting attention are different when recalling imagery in the “mind’s eye” compared to viewing things on a screen.

Spatial attention enhances the processing of specific regions within a visual scene as people view their surroundings, much like a spotlight. Do people orient spatial attention the same way when processing mental images from memory? Anthony Clément and Catherine Tallon-Baudry, from École normale supérieure, explored whether neural mechanisms of spatial attention differ when discriminating between locations in mental images versus visuals on a screen.

The researchers present an experimental task they developed that enabled them to record brain activity while human participants performed spatial discrimination tasks. One task triggered the “mind’s eye” by prompting participants to recall the map of France from memory and focus their attention on the right or left of their mental maps. At the end of each trial, two city names appeared on a screen. Participants had to imagine where the cities were located on the map and choose which one they believed was closer to Paris. People were able to orient spatial attention when retrieving images from memory, but the brain mechanisms were different compared to mechanisms for discriminating between visuals on a screen. While visual perception relied on posterior brain regions, mental imagery relied more on frontal areas. Thus, there may be distinct mechanisms for spatial attention depending on whether people are imagining or seeing visuals.

Says Clément, “Our findings suggest that when we explore a mental image in our ‘mind’s eye,’ we don’t simply reuse the brain mechanisms we rely on when looking at the world. This distinction may help us refine how we think about internal experiences like mental imagery, memory, thoughts, and even consciousness.”