Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 212, July 2021, 104719
Cognition

Mistaking imagination for reality: Congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104719Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Mental imagery leads to more presence responses in a perceptual detection task.

  • This effect is independent of expectation and is stimulus-specific.

  • Imagery vividness is correlated with perceptual detection criterion.

  • These findings can be explained by imagery sometimes being mistaken for perception.

Abstract

Visual experiences can be triggered externally, by signals coming from the outside world during perception; or internally, by signals from memory during mental imagery. Imagery and perception activate similar neural codes in sensory areas, suggesting that they might sometimes be confused. In the current study, we investigated whether imagery influences perception by instructing participants to imagine gratings while externally detecting these same gratings at threshold. In a series of three experiments, we showed that imagery led to a more liberal criterion for reporting stimulus presence, and that this effect was both independent of expectation and stimulus-specific. Furthermore, participants with more vivid imagery were generally more likely to report the presence of external stimuli, independent of condition. The results can be explained as either a low-level sensory or a high-level decision-making effect. We discuss that the most likely explanation is that during imagery, internally generated sensory signals are sometimes confused for perception and suggest how the underlying mechanisms can be further characterized in future research. Our findings show that imagery and perception interact and emphasize that internally and externally generated signals are combined in complex ways to determine conscious perception.

Keywords

Mental imagery
Perception
Reality monitoring
Signal detection theory

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