When light hits the retina, a complex cascade of neural processing is triggered. Light waves are transformed into electrical signals that travel via the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus to the visual cortex (Card and Moore, 1989; Reid and Alonso, 1995) (but see [Bullier, 2001] for other routes). First, low-level visual features such as orientation and spatial frequency are processed in primary, posterior visual areas (Hubel and Wiesel, 1968) after which activation spreads forward towards secondary, more anterior visual areas where high-level features such as shape and eventually semantic category are processed (Maunsell and Newsome, 1987; Thorpe and Fabre-Thorpe, 2001; Vogels and Orban, 1996). This initial feed-forward flow through the visual hierarchy is completed within 150 ms (Seeliger et al., 2018; Thorpe et al., 1996) after which feedback processes are assumed to further sharpen representations over time until a stable percept is achieved (Cauchoix et al., 2014; Kok et al., 2012).

Activation in visual areas can also be triggered internally, in the absence of external sensory signals. During mental imagery, information from memory is used to generate rich visual representations. Neural representations activated during imagery are highly similar to those activated during perception (Dijkstra et al., 2019). Imagining an object activates similar object representations in high-level visual cortex (Dijkstra et al., 2017; Ishai et al., 2000; Lee et al., 2012; Reddy et al., 2010) and generating a mental image with simple visual features such as oriented gratings or letters is associated with perception-like activation of low-level visual areas (Albers et al., 2013; Pearson et al., 2008; Senden et al., 2019).

In contrast, the temporal dynamics underlying the activation within the visual system during perception and mental imagery are presumably very different. The neural dynamics of the early stages of perception have been extensively characterised with intracranial electrophysiological recordings in primates (Thorpe et al., 1996; Thorpe and Fabre-Thorpe, 2001; Hubel and Wiesel, 1968). However, the neural dynamics of imagery, i.e. how activation travels through the brain during internally generated visual experience, remain unclear. Researchers from various fields have proposed that the direction of information flow during internally generated visual experience is reversed compared to perception (Ahissar and Hochstein, 2004; Hochstein and Ahissar, 2002; Kosslyn et al., 2001; Pearson and Keogh, 2019). In line with this idea, a recent study showed that during memory recall, high-level, semantic representations were active before low-level, perceptual representations (Linde-Domingo et al., 2019). However, the localisation of activation in this study was ambiguous such that it is possible that all processing happened within high-level visual cortex but that only the dimension to which the neurons were sensitive changed from abstract features to perceptual features over time (for an example of dynamic neural tuning, see Spaak et al., 2017. Moreover, memory recall was not directly compared with memory encoding. Therefore, it remains unclear whether the same perceptual cascade of neural activation is reactivated in reverse order during internally generated visual experience.

According to predictive processing (PP) theories, reversals of information flow also play an important role during perception. PP states that the brain deals with the inherent ambiguity of incoming sensory signals by incorporating prior knowledge about the world (Helmholtz, 1925). This knowledge is used to generate top-down sensory predictions which are compared to the bottom-up sensory input. Perceptual inference is then accomplished by iteratively updating the model of the world until the difference between prediction and input is minimised (Friston, 2005; Knill and Pouget, 2004). Therefore, the neural dynamics of stimulus information during perception should be characterised by an interplay between feed-forward and feedback sweeps. Simulations based on PP models predict that these recurrent dynamics are dominated by slow-wave oscillations (Bastos et al., 2012; Lozano-Soldevilla and VanRullen, 2019).

In this study, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) and machine learning to characterise the spatio-temporal dynamics of information flow during mental imagery and perception. We first characterised neural activity during the initial perceptual feed-forward sweep using multivariate classifiers at different time points which served as proxies for representations in different visual areas. That is, decoding at early perception time points was taken to reflect stimulus representations in low-level, posterior visual areas while decoding at later time points was taken to reflect high-level, anterior visual representations. Then, we estimated when these feed-forward perception models were reactivated during imagery and later stages of perception to infer the neural dynamics of information processing.

Twenty-five participants executed a retro-cue task while MEG was measured. During the task, two consecutive stimuli were presented, a face and a house or a house and a face, followed by a cue indicating whether participants had to imagine the first or the second stimulus. They then imagined the cued stimulus as vividly as possible and indicated their experienced imagery vividness. There were eight exemplars per stimulus category which were chosen to be highly similar to minimise variation in low-level details within categories and to maximise between-category differences. To ensure that participants were generating detailed mental images, we included catch trials during which participants had to indicate which of four highly similar exemplars they had just imagined. An accuracy of 89.9% (SD = 5.4%) indicated that participants did indeed imagine the stimuli with a high degree of visual detail.

Inferring information flow using perceptual feed-forward classifier models

Classifier models representing neural representations at different time points during perception were obtained using linear discriminant analysis (LDA). An LDA classifier was trained to decode the stimulus class ('face' vs 'house') from sensor level activity at each time point, giving different perception models for different time points (Figure 1A). We decided to only focus on the time period between 70 ms and 130 ms after stimulus onset, which, with a sampling rate of 300 Hz, contained 19 perception models. Perceptual content could be decoded significantly better than chance level at 70 ms after stimulus onset (Dijkstra et al., 2018). This is in line with intracranial and MEG studies which showed that visual information is detectable in early visual cortex from 50 ms onwards (Thorpe and Fabre-Thorpe, 2001; Ramkumar et al., 2013). Furthermore, both intracranial as well as scalp electrophysiology has shown that around 130 ms, high-level object representations first get activated (Isik et al., 2014; Maunsell and Newsome, 1987; Seeliger et al., 2018; Vogels and Orban, 1996). Therefore, this early time window is representative of the feed-forward sweep during perception. In line with this, source reconstruction of the sensor-level activation patterns at different time points shows that stimulus information (i.e. the difference in activation between faces and houses [Haufe et al., 2014] spreads from low-level visual areas towards higher-level visual areas during this period (Figure 1A). Furthermore, cross-correlation between the information flow in early visual cortex (EVC) and inferior temporal cortex (IT; Figure 1B) confirms that stimulus information is available in low-level EVC 26.3 ms (CI = 13.1 to 32.9 ms) before it reaches high-level IT.

Figure 1

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Source data for panel A.

Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options. Source = a FieldTrip source-reconstruction structure with the source-reconstructed stimulus information averaged over participants in the field source.avg.pow2. Bnd = the vertices which can be used to plot source-activation as ft_plot_mesh(bnd,. . . ).

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Source data for panel B.

Activation = subject x area x time source-reconstructed stimulus information.

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To identify when these representations were reactivated during imagery, we tested the perception models on imagery to obtain the distances to the classifier hyperplanes per trial (Figure 1C–E). The distance to the hyperplane indicates the amount of classifier evidence present in the data. Distance measures have previously been used as a measure of model activation (Kerrén et al., 2018; Linde-Domingo et al., 2019) and have been linked to reaction time measurements (Grootswagers et al., 2018). For each perception model and for each imagery trial, we identified the time of the absolute peak distance (Linde-Domingo et al., 2019). This resulted in a trial-by-trial estimate of the reactivation timing for the different perception models. If processing happens in a similar order during imagery as during perception, we would expect that during imagery, early perception models are reactivated earlier in time than late perception models (Figure 1F). This would result in a positive relation between perception model time and imagery reactivation time. If instead, processing happens in reverse order, with late, high-level models being active before earlier models, we would see a negative relation between perception model time and imagery model time.

We tested whether this analysis approach was indeed able to infer the order of reactivation of neural representations using simulations (see Methods; Simulations). The perceptual feedforward sweep was simulated as the sequential activation of five neural representations, operationalised as pseudorandom sensor projections (Figure 2A). We then tested whether distance measures could successfully identify the order of reactivation in a testing (i.e. imagery) set with either small temporal jitter (SD of the onset between trials = 0.1 s) or large temporal jitter (SD = 0.5 s). First the cross-decoding accuracy is plotted for each combination of training and testing time point, computed by averaging classifier performance over trials per time point (Figure 2B–D; top panels). For small amounts of temporal jitter, the temporal profile of the decoding accuracy clearly differentiates between same or reversed order of reactivation (compare top-left panel of Figure 2B and Figure 2C). However, for larger temporal jitter, which is supposedly the case during mental imagery (Dijkstra et al., 2018), the temporal profile of the decoding accuracy smears out over the testing time axis, completely obscuring the order of reactivations. In contrast, the reactivation time defined as the peak distance time point per trial accurately indicates the direction of the relationship with the training sequence, irrespective of the amount of temporal jitter.

Figure 2

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Source data from the simulations.

jitSD_vals = the SD values used to create the between-trial jitter of the different data sets. models = senors x perception time points x stimulus classes activation patterns. accSO = per jitter value a cell containing nsubjects x perception training time points x imagery testing points decoding accuracy for a dataset in which reactivation happened in the same order. accRO = same for reactivation in reversed order. reactSO = per jitter value a cell containing nsubjects x ntrials x perception training time points reactivation times for a dataset in which reactivation happened in the same order. reactRO = same for reactivation in reversed order.

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Our approach has a close relationship with temporal generalisation decoding analysis (King and Dehaene, 2014). Temporal generalisation characterises the stability of neural representations over time by training and testing a classifier on different time points of either the same or different conditions, resulting in a time by time decoding accuracy matrix. Above chance accuracy between two different time points indicates that the neural representation of the stimulus at those time points is similar, whereas chance decoding indicates that the representation between two time points is not similar and has therefore changed over time. In our approach we also train and test classifiers at different time points. However, instead of computing the accuracy between different training and testing time-points by averaging over trials per time point, we determine per training time point and per trial, which testing time point is most similar to the training time point, indicated by the time point with the maximum LDA distance in favour of the correct class (Linde-Domingo et al., 2019; Kerrén et al., 2018; Grootswagers et al., 2018). In other words, our method was targeted at the ordering of the representations, and, critically, did not assume a consistent timing between trials, which has been shown to be a limitation of the temporal generalisation decoding scheme (Vidaurre et al., 2019). When applied to different time epochs, our method revealed whether the order of activation of neural representations is the same or reversed while at the same time allowing for variation in the exact onset of reactivation between trials. We re-emphasise that this is especially important in the current context given that the timing of imagery likely substantially differs between trials, which means that the temporal dynamics will be obscured when computing accuracy by averaging over trials per time point (Dijkstra et al., 2018).

Perceptual feed-forward sweep is reversed during imagery

The reactivation time during imagery for the different perception models is shown in Figure 3A. To test whether there was a significant ordering in the reactivation, we ran a linear mixed-effects model (LMM) with the reactivation time during imagery as dependent variable, the perception model time as fixed predictor, and subject and trial as random variables. Five models with different combinations of random effects were estimated and the model with the highest Schwarz Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) was used to ensure best-fit with minimum number of predictors (Supplementary file 1a). The winning model contained a random effect for the intercept of each subject and trial. This means that this model allowed the reactivation of the perception sequence to start at different time points per trial and per subject, which is in line with the idea that there is a large variation in timing of imagery between trials and subjects (Dijkstra et al., 2018).

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Contains the reactivation time per perception model and per trial, the subject ID ('S').

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Contains the source-reconstructed stimulus information as subject x source parcel x time points as well as the corresponding time vector and source-parcel names for the realigned data.

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Contains the source-reconstructed stimulus information as subject x source parcel x time points as well as the corresponding time vector and source-parcel names for the unaligned data.

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Contains the reactivation time per perception model and per trial, the subject ID ('S') for the permuted classifier.

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Contains the reactivation time per perception model and per trial, the subject ID ('S') for the unfiltered data.

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Contains the reactivation time per perception model and per trial, the subject ID ('S') for the unfiltered and permuted data.

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The model showed a significant main effect of perception time (t(98160) = −5.403, p=6.58e-8) with a negative slope (β0 = 2.05, SD = 0.28; β1 = −1.17,SD = 0.22) indicating that models of later perception time points were associated with earlier imagery reactivation times. The fact that the absolute slope is so close to one suggests that reactivation during imagery of the perception model sequence happens at a similar speed as the original activation during perception.

Next, we reconstructed the imagery activation by realigning the trials based on the identified peak time points for each perception model time point. The imagery time line was inferred using the linear equation obtained from the LMM. The temporal dynamics of high-level IT and low-level EVC (Figure 3B) confirm the conclusion that during imagery, information flows from high-level to low-level visual areas. Cross-correlation between these realigned signals shows that information in IT precedes information in EVC by 11.2 ms (CI = 0 to 29.9 ms). Furthermore, before realignment, time-locked decoding during imagery only revealed a small amount of information in high-level visual cortex (Figure 3D). In contrast, after realignment, stimulus information was also clearly present in EVC. This emphasises how time-locked analyses obscure neural processing during complex cognitive processes such as mental imagery.

To ensure that these results were not due to confounds in the structure of the data irrelevant to reactivation of stimulus representations, we performed the same analysis after permuting the class-labels of the trials, erasing stimulus information while keeping the temporal structure of the data unaltered. Specifically, we trained the perception models using random class assignments and then again calculated the reactivations during imagery. The results are shown in Figure 3B. The sequential reactivation disappeared when using shuffled classifiers as perception time did not significantly predict imagery reactivation time anymore (t(98160) = −0.762, p=0.446). Furthermore, for the main analysis, we removed high frequency noise from the imagery distance traces. To check whether this filter somehow altered the results, we ran the same analysis without the low-pass filter, which gave highly similar results (see Figure 3—figure supplement 1). Without the filter, there was still a significant main effect of perception time (t(98160) = −4.153, p=0.0000328) where models of later perception time points were associated with earlier imagery reactivation times ($\beta$=−0.8942, SD = 0.2153) and the results of the shuffled classifier remained non-significant. Finally, because we used cross-validation within subjects to calculate reactivation timing, there is a dependence between trials of the same subject, violating the independence assumption of first-order statistical tests. As a sanity check, we performed a second test that did not require splitting trials: we used LMM models with reactivation times averaged over trials within subjects, and only 'subject' as a random variable. In this case, the model containing both a random effect of intercept as well as slope per subject best explained the data (see Supplementary file 1c). This between-subject model still showed a significant main effect of perception time (t(24) = −3.24, p=0.003) with a negative slope (β0 = 2.05, SD = 0.03, β1 = −1.19, SD = 0.37) confirming that the effect was not dependent on between-trial statistics.

Reactivation during imagery reveals recurrent processing during later stages of perception

In the previous analysis, we focused on the first 150 ms after stimulus presentation because this period reflects the initial perceptual feed-forward sweep. A negative relationship with imagery reactivation time therefore indicated feedback processing during imagery (Figure 1). However, feedback processes are assumed to play a fundamental role in later stages of perception (Lamme and Roelfsema, 2000; Pennartz et al., 2019). For these later stages of perception, we would therefore expect a positive relation with imagery reactivation, indicating that information flows in the same direction. To investigate this, we next calculated the imagery reactivation time for all time points during perception (Figure 4). The results between 70 ms and 130 ms are equivalent to Figure 3A.

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Contains the identified reactivation trace extrema based on EMD of the empirical traces.

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Contains the reactivation traces as reactivation sample point per trial x perception model time for the unpermuted classifiers.

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Contains the reactivation traces as reactivation sample point per trial x perception model time for the permuted classifiers.

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Interestingly, during the first 400 ms of perception, there seems to be an oscillatory pattern in the relationship between perception time and imagery reactivation time, where positive and negative slopes alternate. This suggests that during perception, the direction of information flow alternates. This pattern repeats four times in 400 ms, roughly reflecting an alpha oscillation. To investigate this further, we quantified 10 Hz power over time using a Morlet decomposition (Figure 4B left, purple curve) and compared the results with the permuted classifier (Figure 4B left, grey curve). There was a significant increase in 10 Hz power between 80 and 315 ms after stimulus onset during perception (all FDR corrected p-values below 0.003). Furthermore, a Fast Fourier Transform over the first 400 ms revealed that the difference in power was limited to the 11.2 Hz frequency (Figure 4B right, p=0.001).

These results indicate that, during perception, stimulus information travels up and down the visual hierarchy aligned to the alpha frequency. To make sure this effect was not due to the low-pass filtering, we applied the same analysis on the unfiltered data, giving almost identical results (see Figure 4—figure supplement 1). We next aimed to parse the signal into feed-forward and feedback sweeps. To this end, we used empirical mode decomposition (EMD) over the first 400 ms to separate the signal in intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). We selected identified increasing and decreasing phases by selecting the period between two subsequent extrema (Figure 4C) and calculated the slope for each phase (single estimated slopes are shown in Figure 4A). The average decreasing (feed-forward) slope was −0.69 (CI = −2.05 to −0.35) and the average increasing (feedback) slope was 1.02 (CI = −0.31 to 2.14; Figure 4D). There was no significant difference in the absolute slope value between increasing and decreasing phases (Mdiff = 0.33, CI: −1.80 to 1.74), revealing no evidence for a difference in processing speed for feed-forward and feedback sweeps.

It might be possible that the oscillation in the reactivation trace is caused by evoked alpha oscillations in the raw signal which modulates signal-to-noise ratio via its amplitude. As can be seen in Figure 4—figure supplement 2, there is indeed a clear evoked alpha oscillation present in the raw signal. To investigate whether the oscillation of the reactivation trace was related to the oscillation in the raw signal, we calculated the spectral coherence at the peak frequency (Figure 4B) between the reactivation trace and the raw signal at each sensor. We then compared the coherence between the raw data and the true activation reactivation with the coherence between the raw data and the reactivation of the shuffled classifier using a permutation test with 10000 permutations. None of the sensors showed a significant difference in coherence between the true and permuted classifier (FDR corrected; Figure 4D), even though the reactivation was only present for the true classifier ( Figure 4B). Furthermore, the topography of the coherence values appears very unstructured (Figure 4D). Together, this suggests that the oscillatory pattern in the reactivated trace does not merely reflect evoked alpha in the raw signal. However, future research is necessary to fully characterise the relationship between the reactivation dynamics and the raw signal dynamics.

Stimulus representations are iteratively updated during perception

If there is indeed a recurrent information flow up and down the visual hierarchy during perception, we should also be able to demonstrate this within perception. The previous results suggest specific time windows of feed-forward and feedback phases during perception. To test whether these different phases indeed reflected reversals of information flow, we applied the reactivation analysis previously used for imagery (Figure 1) to the different perception phases identified in the previous analysis (Figure 4). We predicted that perception classifiers trained during a decreasing (feed-forward) phase would be reactivated in reverse order during an increasing (feedback) phase and vice versa, showing a negative relationship between training time and reactivation time. In contrast, classifiers trained and tested on the same type of phase (both decreasing or both increasing), should show a positive relationship (see Figure 5B, for hypothesised results).

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Contains, for the segmentation of 3 Hz, Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options.

S = per trial, the subject ID. L = for testing x training combination, the sample (time point) of maximum reactivation per trial. Btstrp = bootstrapping samples over trials per phase, per time point. Osc_btstrp = recurrence index calculated for each bootstrapping sample.

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Contains, for the segmentation of 5 Hz, Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options.

S = per trial, the subject ID. L = for testing x training combination, the sample (time point) of maximum reactivation per trial. Btstrp = bootstrapping samples over trials per phase, per time point. Osc_btstrp = recurrence index calculated for each bootstrapping sample.

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Contains, for the segmentation of 10 Hz, Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options.

S = per trial, the subject ID. L = for testing x training combination, the sample (time point) of maximum reactivation per trial. Btstrp = bootstrapping samples over trials per phase, per time point. Osc_btstrp = recurrence index calculated for each bootstrapping sample.

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Contains, for the segmentation of 25 Hz, Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options.

S = per trial, the subject ID. L = for testing x training combination, the sample (time point) of maximum reactivation per trial. Btstrp = bootstrapping samples over trials per phase, per time point. Osc_btstrp = recurrence index calculated for each bootstrapping sample.

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Contains, for the segmentation of 30 Hz, Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options.

S = per trial, the subject ID. L = for testing x training combination, the sample (time point) of maximum reactivation per trial. Btstrp = bootstrapping samples over trials per phase, per time point. Osc_btstrp = recurrence index calculated for each bootstrapping sample.

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Contains, for the segmentation of 37.5 Hz, Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options.

S = per trial, the subject ID. L = for testing x training combination, the sample (time point) of maximum reactivation per trial. Btstrp = bootstrapping samples over trials per phase, per time point. Osc_btstrp = recurrence index calculated for each bootstrapping sample.

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Contains, for the segmentation of 50 Hz, Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options.

S = per trial, the subject ID. L = for testing x training combination, the sample (time point) of maximum reactivation per trial. Btstrp = bootstrapping samples over trials per phase, per time point. Osc_btstrp = recurrence index calculated for each bootstrapping sample.

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Contains, for the segmentation of 75 Hz, Cfg = a configuration structure with the analysis options.

S = per trial, the subject ID. L = for testing x training combination, the sample (time point) of maximum reactivation per trial. Btstrp = bootstrapping samples over trials per phase, per time point. Osc_btstrp = recurrence index calculated for each bootstrapping sample.

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The reactivation traces for the different test phases are shown in Figure 5A. Blue traces represent reactivations during feed-forward phases and pink traces represent reactivations during feedback phases. Grey traces show the results for a permuted classifier. In line with the previous findings, for most phases, there is a clear oscillatory pattern between training time and reactivation time within perception. For each phase, the training time corresponding to that testing phase is highlighted in bold. This time period should always show a positive slope, indicating that classifiers trained and tested on time points belonging to the same phase are reactivated in the same order.

The slopes between the training time and the reactivation time of the different phases are shown below the hypothesised results in Figure 5B. As expected, the diagonal, reflecting training and testing on the same phase, was always positive. In contrast, training and testing on different phases tended to be associated with negative slopes. Note that for all decoding analyses, cross-validation was used, which means that these results cannot be due to overfitting but reflect true representational overlap between phases. To quantify the effect, we calculated a Recurrence Index (RI) which was defined as the dot-product between the vectorised hypothesis-matrix and the empirical-matrix. The RI is positive if the data show the hypothesised oscillatory pattern of slope reversals, zero if there is no clear oscillatory pattern and negative if the data show the opposite pattern. The RI was significantly larger than zero for the true data (RI = 1.83, CI = 1.71 to 1.94, p < 0.0001) but not for the permuted data (RI = −0.008, CI = −0.12 to 0.10, p=0.548). This confirms that during perception, stimulus information flows up and down the visual hierarchy in feedback and feed-forward phases.

The phases that we used here were identified based on the IMF of the oscillation in the imagery reactivation trace (Figure 4), leading to phases of different lengths. Next, we investigated whether we could observe the same pattern if we specified the phases based on fixed evoked oscillations at different frequencies. For example, a 10 Hz oscillation resulted in four feed-forward and four feedback phases of 50 ms each within our 400 millisecond time window. The RI for the different frequencies is plotted in Figure 5C. Whereas the RI was significantly above zero for several low frequencies, the oscillatory pattern was clearest for the IMF based phases and for the 10 Hz oscillation, confirming that the perceptual recurrence is most strongly aligned to the alpha frequency. Furthermore, to investigate whether this pattern of recurrence was indeed specific to the 400 millisecond time window identified previously, we also applied the 10 Hz recurrence analysis to the entire stimulus period (Figure 5D). The results show that the recurrence pattern is indeed restricted the first 400 ms after stimulus onset.

An interesting observation is that the recurrence pattern seems to be restricted to around the testing phase, such that only classifiers trained on phases close to the testing phase show a clear positive or negative relation with reactivation time. This is what causes the 'traveling wave' pattern between the rows in Figure 5A. An intriguing explanation for this observation is that stimulus representations change over subsequent cycles, such that representations only show a reactivation relation with neighbouring phases, but that the representations during later phases are too dissimilar to result in reliable reactivations. We tested whether recurrence was indeed specific to phases around the testing phase by comparing the normalised RI of slopes next to the diagonal in the slope matrix with the other slopes. Neighbouring phases indeed show a significantly higher RI (M = 0.073, CI = 0.069 to 0.076) than other phases (M = 0.002, CI = −0.0004 to 0.005, p < 0.0001), confirming that recurrence was restricted to a small number of cycles.

In this study, we investigated how stimulus representations flow through the visual system during mental imagery and perception. Our results reveal an asymmetry in information processing between perception and imagery. First, we showed that early perception processes are reactivated in reverse order during imagery, demonstrating that during imagery, activation flows from high-level visual areas down to low-level areas over time. Second, for later stages of perception, we found an oscillatory pattern of alternating positive and negative relations with imagery reactivation, indicating recurrent stimulus processing up and down the visual hierarchy aligned to an 11 Hz oscillation. Finally, by focusing on the identified feed-forward and feedback phases, we showed that recurrence during perception was restricted to neighbouring phases, suggesting that the format of neural stimulus representations changed with subsequent cycles of recurrent processing. Together, these findings indicate that during imagery, stimulus representations are activated via feedback processing whereas during perception, stimulus representations are iteratively updated through cycles of recurrent processing.

Our results are neatly in line with predictive processing (PP) theories. According to PP, recurrent processing during perception reflects dynamic hypothesis testing (Bastos et al., 2012; Friston, 2005; Kersten et al., 2004; Knill and Pouget, 2004). Specifically, perceptual inference is assumed to be accomplished via an interplay between top-down prediction signals encoding perceptual hypotheses and bottom-up prediction errors encoding the sensory signal unexplained by these hypotheses. Inferring the cause of sensory input is done by iteratively updating the perceptual hypothesis until the prediction error is minimised, in line with the dynamically changing representations observed here. Importantly, recurrent processing is assumed to happen hierarchically such that each level is activated by both bottom-up evidence as well as top-down predictions (Friston, 2005). This is in line with our observation that feed-forward and feedback sweeps proceeded at the same speed. Also in line with the current findings, PP predicts that these recurrent dynamics are dominated by slow-wave oscillations (Bastos et al., 2012). To our knowledge, the current study is the first to show these perceptual updating cycles empirically in humans. Furthermore, our results suggest that in the current task context, the perceptual inference process was completed in approximately four updating cycles. An exciting avenue for future research is to investigate whether the number of cycles needed can be modulated by task variables such as attention and stimulus noise.

Whereas perception was characterised by dynamically changing representations updated through recurrent cycles, we only found evidence for a single feedback flow during imagery. Specifically, all perceptual feed-forward sweeps showed a negative relationship with the same imagery time window and all perceptual feedback sweeps showed a negative relationship with that same imagery time window. This suggests that the imagery feedback flow contained the complete stimulus representation that was inferred via recurrent cycles during perception. This result fits with the idea that imagery uses the same predictive processes that underlie perceptual inference to run off-line simulations of sensory representations under different hypotheses (Dijkstra et al., 2019; Gershman, 2019; Grush, 2004; Hobson and Friston, 2012; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009). In contrast to perception, during imagery, there is no bottom-up sensory input prompting hypothesis updating. Instead, the perceptual cause is given and feedback connections are used to generate the corresponding low-level sensory representation based on the mapping that was learned during perception. Recurrent processing within the visual system might become important when imagining a more dynamic stimulus in which sensory representations change over time. However, it is also possible that recurrent dynamics were actually present during imagery in this task but that we were unable to reveal them due to signal-to-noise issues. Future research should focus on developing more sensitive techniques to further characterise information flow during imagery. Another interesting question for future research is whether reactivation during mental imagery has to always fully progress down the visual hierarchy. In this study, participants were instructed to generate highly detailed mental images and catch trials were used to ensure that they indeed focused on low-level visual details. It might be the case that if less detail is needed for the task, earlier perception processes are not reactivated and mental simulations stop at a higher level (Kosslyn and Thompson, 2003; Pearson and Keogh, 2019).

Central to this predictive processing interpretation of bottom-up and top-down sweeps is that increasingly abstract stimulus features are processed in higher-level brain areas. This is indeed what has generally been observed in the literature (Hubel and Wiesel, 1968; Thorpe and Fabre-Thorpe, 2001; Vogels and Orban, 1996). However, because we have not directly assessed which stimulus features were captured by the classifiers in this study, we cannot be certain that the sweeps through the visual hierarchy observed here genuinely reflect processing of stimulus information at different levels of abstraction. For example, it is possible for the classifier to be driven by other features of the signal irrelevant to processing of visual information such as general amplification of signal due to differences in attentional capture between the two stimuli, which might have also given rise to sweeps through the visual hierarchy (Michalareas et al., 2016). It is likely that such high-level cognitive mechanisms have influenced processing during later stages of perception. However, a recent study showed that the initial feedforward sweep during perception does not seem to be influenced by attention (Alilović et al., 2019). Moreover, modelling work using Convolutional Neural Networks (CCNs) has shown that the MEG signal during perception does reflect activation of hierarchically increasing complex features over time (Seeliger et al., 2018). Further research using explicit encoding models of stimulus features at different levels of abstraction would be necessary to completely address this point. Furthermore, the current study used a number of non-traditional analysis steps. While we aimed to demonstrate the validity of this approach via simulations, it is worth noting that simulations are not a perfect control since simulated data cannot account for all the features present in real data, and might be blind to other issues. Therefore, to fully ensure that this analysis approach does not suffer from any overlooked confounds, future validation studies are needed.

In conclusion, by using a novel multivariate decoding approach which allowed us to infer the order in which representations were reactivated, we show that, while similar neural representations are activated during imagery and perception, the neural dynamics underlying this activation are different. Whereas perception is characterised by recurrent processing, imagery is dominated by top-down feedback processing. These results are in line with the idea that during perception, high-level causes of sensory input are inferred whereas during imagery, this inferred mapping is reversed to generate sensory representations given these causes. This highlights a fundamental asymmetry in information processing between perception and imagery and sets the stage for exciting new avenues for future research.

The data used in this paper is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11633/di.dcc.DSC_2017.00072_245 and the analysis code is available at https://github.com/NadineDijkstra/IMAREV.git (copy archived at https://github.com/elifesciences-publications/IMAREV).

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Author details

1. Nadine Dijkstra

   1. Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, Netherlands
   2. Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Visualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Project administration, Writing - review and editing

   For correspondence

   n.dijkstra@donders.ru.nl

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1423-9277

2. Luca Ambrogioni

   Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, Netherlands

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

3. Diego Vidaurre

   1. Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom
   2. Department of Clinical Health, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Supervision, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9650-2229

4. Marcel van Gerven

   Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, Netherlands

   Contribution

   Resources, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2206-9098

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