Converging evidence suggests that the primate ventral visual pathway encodes increasingly complex stimulus features in downstream areas. We quantitatively show that there indeed exists an explicit gradient for feature complexity in the ventral pathway of the human brain. This was achieved by mapping thousands of stimulus features of increasing complexity across the cortical sheet using a deep neural network. Our approach also revealed a fine-grained functional specialization of downstream areas of the ventral stream. Furthermore, it allowed decoding of representations from human brain activity at an unsurpassed degree of accuracy, confirming the quality of the developed approach. Stimulus features that successfully explained neural responses indicate that population receptive fields were explicitly tuned for object categorization. This provides strong support for the hypothesis that object categorization is a guiding principle in the functional organization of the primate ventral stream.

Perception is strongly influenced by expectations. Accordingly, perception has sometimes been cast as a process of inference, whereby sensory inputs are combined with prior knowledge. However, despite a wealth of behavioral literature supporting an account of perception as probabilistic inference, the neural mechanisms underlying this process remain largely unknown. One important question is whether top-down expectation biases stimulus representations in early sensory cortex, i.e., whether the integration of prior knowledge and bottom-up inputs is already observable at the earliest levels of sensory processing. Alternatively, early sensory processing may be unaffected by top-down expectations, and integration of prior knowledge and bottom-up input may take place in downstream association areas that are proposed to be involved in perceptual decision-making. Here, we implicitly manipulated human subjects' prior expectations about visual motion stimuli, and probed the effects on both perception and sensory representations in visual cortex. To this end, we measured neural activity noninvasively using functional magnetic resonance imaging, and applied a forward modeling approach to reconstruct the motion direction of the perceived stimuli from the signal in visual cortex. Our results show that top-down expectations bias representations in visual cortex, demonstrating that the integration of prior information and sensory input is reflected at the earliest stages of sensory processing.

For decades, the extent to which visual imagery relies on similar neural mechanisms as visual perception has been a topic of debate. Here, we review recent neuroimaging studies comparing these two forms of visual experience. Their results suggest that there is large overlap in neural processing during perception and imagery: neural representations of imagined and perceived stimuli are similar in visual, parietal and frontal cortex. Furthermore, perception and imagery seem to rely on similar top-down connectivity. The most prominent difference is the absence of bottom-up processing during imagery. These findings fit well with the idea that imagery and perception rely on similar emulation or prediction processes. Externally and internally generated visual experience A large part of our sensory experience is visual. When walking down the street, we are bombarded with different colors, shapes and textures. Also when thinking about future or past events, most people tend to experience a rapid stream of detailed images [1]. Visual experience can be triggered externally, by events in the outside world that change the light that falls unto our retinas, such as during perception (see Glossary); or internally, by information from memory via a process known as mental imagery (see Box 1 on the relationship between imagery and working memory). Generally, these are seen as two distinct phenomena. However, they are phenomenologically similar which can sometimes lead us to question whether we really saw something or whether it was just our imagination. The question to what extent visual imagery relies on the same neural mechanisms as perception has been a topic of debate for decades. Originally, the debate was centered around the question whether imagery, like perception, relied on depictive, picture-like representations, or on symbolic, language-like representations [2-5]. Due to imagery's inherently private nature, for a long time it was impossible to address this question. Neuroimaging studies on the involvement of the primary visual cortex during imagery have now largely resolved this debate in favor of the depictive view [6]. However, a broader perspective, addressing the involvement and interaction of brain regions beyond the primary visual cortex, has been missing. The current review explores to what extent externally and internally generated visual experiences rely on similar neural mechanisms. We discuss the findings with respect to visual areas which are important in the depictivism-versus-symbolism debate, but we also focus on the involvement of parietal and frontal areas. Next, we focus on the temporal dynamics of neural processing during both forms of visual experience. After that, we discuss the overlap in directional connectivity between perception and imagery. We finish by concluding that perception and imagery are in fact highly similar and we discuss the issues and questions raised by this conclusion.

Research suggests that perception and imagination engage neuronal representations in the same visual areas. However, the underlying mechanisms that differentiate sensory perception from imagination remain unclear. Here, we examine the directed coupling (effective connectivity) between fronto-parietal and visual areas during perception and imagery. We found an increase in bottom-up coupling during perception relative to baseline and an increase in top-down coupling during both perception and imagery, with a much stronger increase during imagery. Modulation of the coupling from frontal to early visual areas was common to both perception and imagery. Furthermore, we show that the experienced vividness during imagery was selectively associated with increases in top-down connectivity to early visual cortex. These results highlight the importance of top-down processing in internally as well as externally driven visual experience.

Neocortical neuronal activity is characterized by complex spatiotemporal dynamics. Although slow oscillations have been shown to travel over space in terms of consistent phase advances, it is unknown how this phenomenon relates to neuronal activity in other frequency bands. We here present electrocorticographic data from three male and one female human subject and demonstrate that gamma power is phase locked to traveling alpha waves. Given that alpha activity has been proposed to coordinate neuronal processing reflected in the gamma band, we suggest that alpha waves are involved in coordinating neuronal processing in both space and time.