Jianghao Liu

Next session of #IRCA Aphantasia Online Talk #19 is next Tuesday the 10th March at 11am (CET/Paris), by Derek H. Arnold @visnerd.bsky.social (University of Queensland).
Title: The hopeless quest for a reliable objective metric of visual imagery.
More details here: jianghao-liu.github.io/irca/

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses - Nature Neuroscience Top-down projections from the orbitofrontal cortex carry predictive signals that grow with sound experience and suppress the auditory cortex via inhibitory circuits, revealing a predictive mechanism f...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses

Interesting results showing that during habituation, the OFC generate a “negative image” to shape sensory cortex instead of an enhanced novelty-driven activity.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our symposium, #“Aphantasia_and_Consciousness,” has been accepted for the upcoming @assc2026.bsky.social! Speakers include @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, @giuliacabbai.bsky.social, Lu Teng, and myself (Chair). Looking forward to great discussions — come join us if you’ll be there! theassc.org/assc-29/

Keynotes: Adam Zeman, Wilma Bainbridge, @jorge-morales.bsky.social @larsmuckli.bsky.social @andreablomkvist.bsky.social, and many aphantasia researchers!

https://sites.google.com/view/irca-conference-2026/home

📢We're thrilled to announce the first-ever #IRCA Conference on #Aphantasia!
Call for abstracts is open, deadline: 17 April 2026
sites.google.com/view/irca-co...
This 3-day interdisciplinary conference aims to consolidate current knowledge and draw a future plan for aphantasia research.

Next session of #IRCA Aphantasia Talk #18 is next thursday the 26th at 3pm (CET/Paris), by Edward H. Silson (University of Edinburgh). Title: Reduced category selectivity – the neural correlates of aphantasia. More details here: jianghao-liu.github.io/irca/

新春快乐！

The Fusiform Imagery Node: Where Vision Meets Concepts in the Left Temporal Lobe We present a perspective that integrates clinical and neuroimaging evidence to argue that voluntary visual mental imagery is supported by a distribute…

W/Paolo Bartolomeo and @alfredospagna.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our position paper on the #FIN
The neural basis of our mind’s eye: clinical and neuroimaging evidence converge on a distributed brain network organized around the #Fusiform_Imagery_Node (FIN) in the left fusiform gyrus.
#Neuroscience #Neuroimaging #CognitiveNeurology #MentalImagery #Aphantasia

Exciting news! I'm starting a 6-month research stay at Duke University with @coganlab.bsky.social, exploring the neural mechanisms of verbal working memory, speech planning, and inner speech. If you are in the area and would like to meet up, feel free to reach out.

Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? People with aphantasia are offering a window into consciousness.

A feature in Nature examines the research about aphantasia, which is the experience of people with no mental imagery, and how it could offer a window into consciousness. #Neuroskyence 🧪

A Neural Model of Conscious Mental Imagery and Aphantasia Mental imagery refers to one’s quasi-perceptual experience in the absence of direct external input. Yet around 4% of individuals with “aphantasia” rep…

A Neural Model of Conscious Mental Imagery and Aphantasia, out in Neuropsychologia (open access) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Yes, we now have a model to study unconscious and conscious mental imagery. Looking forward to your thought!

Congrats! And looking forward to seeing u soon in Glasgow!

Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? People with aphantasia are offering a window into consciousness.

Think about your breakfast this morning. Can you imagine the pattern on your coffee mug? The sheen of the jam on your half-eaten toast?

go.nature.com/3ZiHLtN

Imagery modulates the pupillary response, but this does not reliably index differences in imagery vividness. Most people report that they can imagine seeing things in their mind’s eye. But there are large individual differences. A small proportion of people r…

New Paper: Pupillary responses are not a reliable index of differences in imagery vividness.

Our search for more reliable metrics of imagery continues...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Lesions Causing Aphantasia are Connected to the Fusiform Imagery Node The absence of visual mental imagery, called aphantasia, occurs congenitally in up to 3% of the general population, but the brain regions responsible …

Can a brain injury make someone lose their imagination?

We describe rare cases of acquired aphantasia, people who lost the ability to visually imagine after a stroke or other brain injury. Now published in Cortex 🧠 @braincircuits.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Could we, and how to empirically study unconscious mental imagery? Open questions on both conceptual and methodological perspectives
drive.google.com/file/d/1Gmu5...

Very interesting!

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. This is thought to occur in part by recruiting early...

new paper in TICS officially out today. great learning from and writing with Anastasia, and super cool cover art from Prof. Pinar Yoldas.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

It’s today! Looking forward !

Thanks! Super interesting!

Imagery

Very interesting. Could we know if infants have mental imager?

Are we aware of neural activity in imagination? The attention model of conscious imagery and aphantasia — The Junkyard A post by Jianghao Liu Please imagine a red Gala apple. Is it darker or lighter than a cherry? Most of us can easily conjure a mental image, a perceptual-like experience that feels almost as if we we...

Are we aware of neural activity in imagination? The attention model of conscious imagery and aphantasia

junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2025/11...

A new paper from the lab, using 7T fMRI and MEG to shed light on how we read, specifically how the visual system encodes strings of letters and moves from retinotopic to ordinal neural codes.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

UCL’s Consciousness Club series resumes tomorrow Wed 22nd Oct with Ken Paller @paller.bsky.social on “Two Sides of Sleep and Memory: Conscious and Unconscious”

3pm-430pm UK time

All welcome, for zoom details please see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes...

Neural Network Topologies Supporting Individual Variations in Vividness of Visual Imagery Vividness of visual imagery varies considerably across individuals, yet its neural underpinnings remain unclear. As emphasized in recent debates, a ke…

New study from @timokvamme.bsky.social
suggests we may have overlooked a critical brain region in mental imagery research: the insula:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
After decades of research focusing on sensory/frontal/parietal regions, the insula may be just as central to imagery.

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Thanks! This is exactly the idea! I’m trying to dissociate these stages by behavior, if possible.