By systematically characterizing subjective experience during mental imagery, Anderson et al. demonstrate neural overlap between imagery and perception in transmodal association networks. These results raise fundamental and exciting new questions about the role of sensory reinstatement in mental imagery.
The contemporary definition of mental imagery is characterized by two aspects: a sensory representation that resembles, but does not result from, perception, and an associated subjective experience. Neuroimaging demonstrated imagery-related sensory representations in primary visual cortex (V1) that show striking parallels to perception. However, it remains unclear whether these representations...