Postdoctoral Research Fellow | @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social, previously @sussex.ac.uk | Mental imagery, spontaneous thoughts, @giuliacabbai.bsky.social
Joined November 2012
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So happy to see our paper finally out in @CurrentBiology ! 🥳 Link: cell.com/current-biology/ful…
Here's a thread I made on the preprinted version: teapawt.net/GiuliaCabbai/status/17…
A bit late to the party, but here's a thread about our new fMRI study preprint, in which we found that V1 is not sufficient for subjective imagery experience. biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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Giulia Cabbai retweeted
Aware and Alive: ASSC27 Satellite Symposium on Embodied and Phenomenological Perspectives on Consciousness
sites.google.com/view/awarea…
This spontaneous imagery rating was followed by ratings of voluntary imagery experience of the same sounds.
In a second scanning part, participants listened to all sounds again, but this time while voluntarily conjuring visual images of the sound content.
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Taken together, these results thus show that, while V1 is not sufficient for the subjective experience of imagery, precuneus appears to play a key role in its presence.
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Special thanks to my amazing collaborators, Chris Racey, Julia Simner, Carla Dance, @JamieWardSussex and @SophieForster!😊
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A bit late to the party, but here's a thread about our new fMRI study preprint, in which we found that V1 is not sufficient for subjective imagery experience. biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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To induce spontaneous imagery in the scanner, we first played to our blindfolded participants a series of natural sounds (e.g., dog barking, cat meowing, traffic cars noise, etc) selected via previous pilot studies for their ability to induce visual imagery.
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Indeed, lacking the ability to generate imagery on demand does not exclude that someone might still experience imagery or generate its associated sensory representation when triggered automatically.
For this reason, we looked at both spontaneous and voluntary forms of imagery.
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However, we considered that our main question could not be answered by just employing voluntary imagery paradigms, which have dominated the imagery literature.
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We therefore tested for both the presence of decodable sensory representations in primary visual cortex as well as subjective experience in 26 visualisers and 24 aphantasics.
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The association assumption is challenged by neurological case studies and recent non-clinical evidence showing that people who cannot experience imagery at will (aphantasics) show preserved performance in tasks considered to involve internal visual cortex representations.
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