Many people think in pictures. Can this occur together with the processing of visual information? By using neuroimaging methods, behavioral experiments, and a bicycle simulator, the researchers will reveal how the brain combines seeing and visual thinking, how people differ in this ability, and why we it can be difficult to rapidly switch between seeing and thinking, for example as a result of aging.
Unique combination of methods
During this project, Marius Peelen will use human brain scans and behavioural tasks to explore how the brain handles information from the outside world in combination with information from our own thoughts. Peelen: “We plan to investigate how these two types of information interact in the visual part of the brain. To accomplish this, we will apply ideas and models from visual neuroscience to understand how external and internal representations compete with each other in our brain.”
To provide an overview of the project, the project will: show how what we see and what we think about compete in the brain; reveal how focusing our attention (inwards or outwards) changes this competition; compare how this competition works in younger and older people to understand how aging affects it; investigate how different people's thinking styles - how vivid their mental images are, and how prone they are to hallucinations - affect this competition; and finally, test how internal-external competition affects real-life situations, like riding a bike in traffic, using a bike simulator.
Altogether, the aim is to provide a neural mechanism for why we sometimes succeed and sometimes fail in simultaneously processing external and internal visual information. The outcomes of this study could be relevant for informing traffic safety policy and the way we should use traffic signs for instance.
