Dpt of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Renewal of both Research Award and Teaching Fellowship, Dept of Psychology, Universite Lumiere, Lyon. D in Cognitive Psychology - Dept of Psychology , University of Lyon, France. Master's Degree in Cognitive Neuroscience - Dept of Psychology , University of Lyon, France. Contribution of the priming paradigm.
Cerebral areas dedicated to visual perception seem to be implicated by visual mental imagery.
Nevertheless, some differences have been reported between these activities. As a consequence, a question that remains unsolved is how much representational and functional overlap there is between them. The novelty of my approach was that I used a perceptual priming paradigm. My aim was to examine to what extent imagery primes perception, that is, to what extent these activities share representations and processes. First, I showed that imagery primes perception when detailed visualimages are generated but not when global visual images or spatial images are generated.