Qian Chu, Tracing auditory imagery: Motor and memory contributions to internal perceptual experience

What is the nature of the ‘mind’s eye/ear’? The neuroscientific literature has widely confirmed sensory imagination’s similar neural substrates as perception. It remains elusive, however, where and how such perceptual representations are generated during imagery. We have hypothesized that in addition to the conventional memory retrieval narrative, there also exists the possibility of perceptual reactivation based on sequential motor simulation. Here we present an fMRI study on auditory reactivation during speech and hearing imagery to examine the neural processing of the ‘mind’s ear’. Using brain activation and effective connectivity (DCM) analyses, we identified two functional neural streams (motor-to-sensory and memory-to-sensory) recruited during imagery of speech and imagery of non-speech sounds, respectively. Our dual-stream model diversifies discussions on imagery dynamics, and our neural results provided empirical implications for the neural architecture of motor- and memory-based predictions.

The CoRN 2021 program page: