Visual Imagery and Visual Perception Possible to have visual imagery without visual perception?

When we see an object we can recognise it because the different features of the object are brought together via a binding mechanism. This can be made through the activation of a population of neurons or represented in a hyper-column in the visual cortex, but being one or the other it has a specific pattern that allows that object to be recognised as unique. But we can also see the same object with our eyes closed, and the different features are kept. So the same pattern as before should be activated. How can this be done without retinal inputs? Neural info related to form, motion and colour no single hierarchical pathway but a complex mechanism There are three main hypotheses regarding this subject 1. There is an anatomical separation between the visual cortical areas serving visual imagery and those serving visual perception. 2. The areas used for visual imagery are a subset of those engaged in perception. 3. The areas subserving visual perception and imagery are the same (Roland, & Gulys, 1994). Imagery not an undifferentiated but a set of abilities which can be disrupted independently. If dreams with visual content could be demonstrated in congenitally blind persons, this would imply that visual imagery is possible in subjects who have been prevented from having visual experiences. Furthermore, this would allow one to infer that visual imagery does not depend on specific visual perception, but can emerge from activation of visual cortex by nonvisual inputs. Some authors also report that subjects, who are born blind report dreams which do not include any description of scenes or landscapes but contain mostly sounds, touch sensations or emotional experiences. Methodology - Tasks to evaluate graphical presentations (Blind and sighted with their eyes closed) 1. Graphical representation (drawing) of oneiric scene. 2. Graphical representation of a human figure. Quantitative evaluation using Quoc Vus Test (Cambier & Quoc Vu, 1985) and The Goodenough scale (Goodenough, 1928) Various criteria such as dimensions, presence or absence of a body part, proportion, detailing, etc. Result No statistical difference found out. Minor differences like Blind drew ears more often than sighted. Inference 1. According to these results, the congenitally blind, who have never experienced sight, are able to visualise. 2. The observation of alpha attenuation/visual content correlation along with the no differences in the graphical representations leads us to hypothesize that blind subjects can produce virtual images, that is, that their dreams correspond to the activation of visual cortical regions.

3. This implies that the born-blind subjects are capable of using other sensory modalities to integrate these inputs via the visual system to produce concepts capable of graphical representation. 4. Not just spatial or metric representation but pictorial representation.

Kerr, Domhoff According to Foulkes (1999), these studies have theoretical implications beyond the issue of blindness because they suggest that the mental imagery necessary for dreaming develops between the ages of 4 and 7. The research studies they cited did not lead the original authors to the conclusion that blind people experience visual imagery. Instead, researchers studying waking imagery in blind and sighted individuals have generally concluded that congenitally blind individuals' imagery has characteristics that are functionally equivalent in many ways to the characteristics of visual imagery reported by sighted individuals. The images of totally congenitally blind individuals, however, lack the uniquely visual characteristics such as color and brightness and result in slight differences from the performance of sighted individuals on several imagery tasks. This claim is in direct contradiction to conclusions based on a large body of research investigating how blind people create and interpret pictorial drawings of waking experiences. Researchers generally employ raised-line drawings that blind people can trace with their fingers. Kennedy (1993, 1997), for example, has conducted extensive empirical research showing not only that blind people are capable of drawing twodimensional figures but also that their drawings are similar to the drawings of sighted individuals in the depiction of depth, motion, perspective, vantage point, surfaces, contours, edges, and other characteristics. Kennedy did not interpret his findings as evidence that blind people experience visual imagery. Rather, he attributed the accuracy of drawings by blind people to the overlap in information obtained through visual and tactile perceptual systems. According to Kennedy, even though vision and touch are two different perceptual systems, one responsive to light waves and the other to pressure, they are both processed in an area of the brain that encodes and integrates the common elements of information. Kennedy suggested that the area of the brain that is responsive to several modalities, not just to vision, could more accurately be called "multimodal" or "amodal." Kennedy's empirical findings and the interpretations of them are consistent with the research on imagery described in the previous paragraph. The attenuation may also be related to auditory, haptic, somatosensory, or tactile processing or, in fact, to generalized imagery processing that is tied to no specific modality. Because we do not know the context in which the visual words were used by blind dreamers in Brtolo et al.'s study, it is difficult to speculate about why visual words were most closely associated with attenuation of alpha activity.

Virtual imagery integrated via the brain area traditionally labeled visual is one thing; visual imagery is another. The potential confusion is not present in dream reports of individuals who are visually impaired from birth but who retain some ability to see visual characteristics such as brightness and color and are able to match waking visual experience to dreaming visual experience. These individuals universally report that visual images in their dreams appear to them as they would in waking life. They can see things in dreams with no more clarity or detail than they could see in wakefulness, yet they know the details of the dream environment through the integration of information from other sensory systems. Uniquely visual imagery is dependent on uniquely visual experience.