Perceived and mentally rotated contents are differentially represented in cortical depth of V1

Abstract

In order to test whether there is a cortical depth compartmentalization in the processing of external and internally-generated visual contents, Iamshchinina et al use high-resolution fMRI at 7 T in participants performing a mental rotation task. They demonstrate that feedforward and feedback representations during mental rotation manifest at differentiable grey matter depth in early visual cortex, thereby reflecting a general strategy for implementing multiple cognitive functions within a single brain region.