improvement of peripheral visual discrimination through mental imagery

Visual perception is fundamentally limited by crowding, the impairment of object recognition by nearby elements. Previous work has shown that crowding can be alleviated through long-range grouping mechanisms: Visual discrimination improved when a crowded peripheral target matched the centrally presented item. This study investigated whether mental imagery can alleviate crowding and improve peripheral discrimination. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that target discrimination improved when observers imagined an item matching the crowded peripheral target. Importantly, this facilitation did not occur when imagining a different item or an item matching in semantic content only. These results suggest that imagery engages detailed visual representations that can interact with degraded peripheral visual input to enhance perceptual discrimination. Our findings have important implications for the use of mental imagery to improve peripheral vision in everyday contexts, sports, and clinical settings.