The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
May 27, 2026
Alfredo Spagna, Jianghao Liu, Paolo Bartolomeo
What neural events precede conscious reports? Hemisphere-asymmetric attentional networks are causally related to conscious perception (Kaufmann et al., 2024; Bartolomeo et al., 2025), but their spectrotemporal dynamics remain unclear. Here, we used magnetoencephalography to examine brain oscillations occurring in human participants (male and female) before a near-threshold target during the...
Annual review of vision science
May 6, 2026
Paolo Bartolomeo
Visual mental imagery-the ability to generate percept-like experiences in the absence of external stimuli-varies widely across individuals, from vivid visualization to aphantasia, the reported absence of imagery. Evidence from neurological patients and functional neuroimaging converges to challenge the classical view that imagery depends on the reactivation of the early visual cortex. Instead,...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Silvana Lozito, Stefano Lasaponara, Jianghao Liu et al.
A recent study using intracerebral electroencephalography (EEG) recordings in human patients has documented the electrophysiological correlates of conscious reporting of near-threshold visual targets that followed supra-threshold peripheral spatial cues. Here, we aimed to bridge these intracerebral EEG events with corresponding surface recording, differentiating between conscious and...
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
April 2025
Jianghao Liu, Minye Zhan, Dounia Hajhajate et al.
Most of us effortlessly describe visual objects, whether seen or remembered. Yet, around 4% of people report congenital aphantasia: they struggle to visualize objects despite being able to describe their visual appearance. What neural mechanisms create this disparity between subjective experience and objective performance? Aphantasia can provide novel insights into conscious processing and...
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
September 1, 2023
Jianghao Liu, Paolo Bartolomeo
68 citations
Different individuals experience varying degrees of vividness in their visual mental images. The distribution of these variations across different imagery domains, such as object shape, color, written words, faces, and spatial relationships, remains unknown. To address this issue, we conducted a study with 117 healthy participants who reported different levels of imagery vividness. Of these...