Mental Imagery of Face Enhances Face-Sensitive Event-Related Potentials to Ambiguous Visual Stimuli

Publication date: Available online 22 July 2017
Source:Biological Psychology
Author(s): Lingxi Lu, Changxin Zhang, Liang Li
Visual mental imagery forms mental representations of visual objects when correspondent stimuli are absent and shares some characters with visual perception. Both the vertex-positive-potential (VPP) and N170 components of event-related potentials (ERPs) to visual stimuli have a remarkable preference to faces. This study investigated whether visual mental imagery modulates the face-sensitive VPP and/or N170 components. The results showed that with significantly larger amplitudes under the face-imagery condition than the house-imagery condition, the VPP and P2 responses, but not the N170 component, were elicited by phase-randomized ambiguous stimuli. Thus, the brain substrates underlying VPP are not completely identical to those underlying N170, and the VPP/P2 manifestation of the category selectivity in imagery probably reflects an integration of top-down mental imagery signals (from the prefrontal cortex) and bottom-up perception signals (from the early visual cortex) in the occipito-temporal cortex where VPP and P2 originate.



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