A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex

Mental imagery allows us to remember previous experiences and imagine new ones. Animal studies have yielded rich insight into mechanisms for visual perception, but the neural mechanisms for visual imagery remain poorly understood. We determined that approximately 80% of visually responsive single neurons in the human ventral temporal cortex (VTC) use a distributed axis code to represent objects. We used that code to reconstruct objects and generate maximally effective synthetic stimuli. We then recorded responses from the same neural population while subjects imagined specific objects; about 40% of axis-tuned VTC neurons recapitulated the visual code. Our findings reveal that visual imagery is supported by reactivation of the same neurons involved in perception, providing single-neuron evidence for the existence of a generative model in human VTC.