Feb 072017
Prior studies show that visual imagery is a top-down reinstatement of visual perception, which likely extends to domains of visual expertise. But while self-reported vividness of mental images has been found to predict activity levels in visual areas, we found that self-reported vividness of mental images of cars is unrelated to subjects’ perceptual expertise with cars (Sunday et al., 2016). To further investigate this, we use functional MRI and multi-voxel pattern analysis to ask if car experts engage the fusiform face area during mental imagery of cars.