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A neuronal basis for mental imagery

Stephen M. Fleming^1,2,3,* , Nadine Dijkstra⁴

¹Department of Experimental Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK
²Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London, UK
³CIFAR Program in Brain, Mind and Consciousness, Toronto, ON, Canada
⁴Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK
* Correspondence: Stephen M. Fleming(stephen.fleming@ucl.ac.uk)

Wadia et al. provide rare single-neuron evidence that mental imagery reactivates a perceptual code in the human ventral temporal cortex, with a substantial subset of object-tuned neurons showing shared tuning across seeing and imagining. By characterizing neuronal activity in a feature space derived from a deep neural network, the study demonstrates that imagery recapitulates the structure of perceptual representations.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41422-026-01260-6

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