LAUSR

J. Pearson on visual mental imagery (Pearson, J. The human imagination: the cognitive neuroscience of visual mental imagery. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 20, 624–634 (2019))1. The author outlines a model of visual mental imagery based on neuroimaging findings that involves large-scale brain networks spanning prefrontal areas to sensory areas, and that highlights the activation of occipital areas during visual mental imagery. Specifically, the model indicates that it is the “sensory and spatial representations of the imagery content” that would be formed in early visual areas. However, individuals with acquired brain damage restricted to the occipital cortex typically have perfectly vivid visual mental imagery. For example, a patient with bilateral strokes in the white matter between the occipital and the temporal cortices2 had severe visual deficits for object form and colour, faces, words and letters but demonstrated perfectly preserved visual mental imagery abilities for these same items3. In addition, people with cortical blindness due to bilateral occipital lesions can experience vivid visual mental images4,5. By contrast, patients with damage ext end ing anteriorly in the temporal lobe, espe cially in the left hemisphere, often find them selves unable to build visual mental images6,7. Where does the discrepancy between the neuroimaging and neuropsy cholo gical findings come from? The neuroimaging results supporting the imagery proposed by Pearson1, whereby fronto-parietal networks initiate, modulate and maintain activity in a core left temporal network centred on high-level visual regions in the ventral temporal cortex, with no causal role of early visual cortex. There is a reply to this letter by Pearson J. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41583-020-0349-4 (2020). Paolo Bartolomeo 1 ✉, Dounia Hajhajate1, Jianghao Liu1,2 and Alfredo Spagna1,3 1Sorbonne Université, Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Paris Brain Institute, ICM, Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, 75013, Paris, France. 2Dassault Systèmes, Vélizy-Villacoublay, France. 3Department of Psychology, Columbia University in the City of New York, New York, NY, USA 10027. ✉e-mail: [email protected]