ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Perception Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1568148
This article is part of the Research TopicVisual Perception and Mental Imagery in Aging, Health and DiseaseView all 6 articles
Varieties of Imagery and Perception: The Structure of Task Differences
Provisionally accepted
- 1LCOMS, Université de Lorraine, Metz, Lorraine, France
- 2Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
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One purpose of this study was to assess the dimensions and factors underlying visual mental imagery abilities in young healthy participants. We administered 15 tasks to 32 participants, assessing a wide range of imagery abilities, including imagery for faces, common objects, colors, words, mental rotation, scanning, image maintenance, auditory imagery, and tactile imagery. A second purpose was to compare the underlying pattern of factors and dimensions in imagery with those in the corresponding perception tasks. Response times and error rates were correlated for the imagery and for the perception tasks separately. The matrices were then analyzed using multidimensional scaling and principal components analysis. All analyses indicated the presence of two main clusters, one that appeared to correspond to tasks that draw on the object-properties "ventral system" and one that appeared to correspond to tasks that draw on the spatial-properties "dorsal system." These results indicate a common segregation of the two major processing systems in visual imagery and visual perception.
Keywords: dorsal vs. ventral streams1, visual perception2, mental imagery3, human4, healthy5. (Min.5-Max. 8)
Received: 28 Jan 2025; Accepted: 18 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 BERARDI, Kosslyn and Riffle. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anna Maria BERARDI, LCOMS, Université de Lorraine, Metz, Lorraine, France
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