Perceptual Representations and the Vividness of Stimulus-Triggered and Stimulus-Independent Experiences

Abstract

In recent years, researchers from independent subfields have begun to engage with the idea that the same cortical regions that contribute to on-line perception are recruited during and underlie off-line activities such as information maintenance in working memory, mental imagery, hallucinations, dreaming, and mind wandering. Accumulating evidence suggests that in all of these cases the activity of posterior brain regions provides the contents of experiences. This article is intended to move one step further by exploring specific links between the vividness of experiences, which is a characteristic feature of consciousness regardless of its actual content, and certain properties of the content-specific neural-activity patterns. Investigating the mechanisms that underlie mental imagery and its relation to working memory and the processes responsible for mind wandering and its similarities to dreaming form two clusters of research that are in the forefront of the recent scientific study of mental phenomena, yet communication between these two clusters has been surprisingly sparse. Here our aim is to foster such information exchange by articulating a hypothesis about the fine-grained phenomenological structure determining subjective vividness and its possible neural basis that allows us to shed new light on these mental phenomena by bringing them under a common framework.

Mistaking imagination for reality: Congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection

“…In other words, more vivid imagery was associated with an increased tendency to report the presence of external stimuli. This finding suggests that deciding about internal stimulus presence (imagery vividness) and external stimulus presence (detection criterion) might rely on a common mechanism ( Fazekas, Nemeth, & Overgaard, 2020 ). This is in line with studies showing a positive correlation between imagery vividness and hallucinations ( Matthews, Collins, Thakkar, & Park, 2014 ; Sack, Van De Ven, Etschenberg, Schatz, & Linden, 2005 ; Salge, Pollmann, & Reeder, 2020 ; Shine et al, 2015 ; Stephan-Otto et al, 2017 ).…”

Spontaneous perception: a framework for task-free, self-paced perception

“…2019 ). Along similar lines, the coarse-vividness hypothesis ( Campana and Tallon-Baudry 2013 ) proposes that subjective experience is first sustained by coarse information processing, which can then become more vivid by a later refinement stage of processing the details, suggested to grant conscious experience qualities such as visual intensity or visual specificity ( Fazekas et al . 2020 ).…”

Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness as such

“…For example, features central to altered states of consciousness cannot be specified by a single dimension or level and require other dimensions (Carter and Bayne 2019;Milliere et al 2018). Contents too can be seen as a summation of a number of other dimensions or factors, such as subjective sense of specificity, vividness and intensity (Fazekas et al 2020).…”

“…Since states and contents interact, there will an overlap, such that for example vividness may characterize content but also be related to alertness and the level of arousal. (Fazekas et al 2020).…”