Brain Functional Connectivity During First- and Third-Person Visual Imagery

Vision. 2025. Vol. 9. No. 2. Article 30.

Pechenkova E., Mary Rachinskaya, Vasilenko V., Blazhenkova O., Mershina E.

The ability to adopt different perspectives, or vantage points, is fundamental to human cognition, affecting reasoning, memory, and imagery. While the first-person perspective allows individuals to experience a scene through their own eyes, the thirdperson perspective involves an external viewpoint, which is thought to demand greater cognitive effort and different neural processing. Despite the frequent use of perspective switching across various contexts, including modern media and in therapeutic settings, the neural mechanisms differentiating these two perspectives in visual imagery remain largely underexplored. In an exploratory fMRI study, we compared both activation and task-based functional connectivity underlying first-person and third-person perspective taking in the same 26 participants performing two spatial egocentric imagery tasks, namely imaginary tennis and house navigation. No significant differences in activation emerged between the first-person and third-person conditions. The network-based statistics analysis revealed a small subnetwork of the early visual and posterior temporal areas that manifested stronger functional connectivity during the first-person perspective, suggesting a closer sensory recruitment loop, or, in different terms, a loop between long-term memory and the “visual buffer” circuits. The absence of a strong neural distinction between the first-person and third-person perspectives suggests that third-person imagery may not fully decenter individuals from the scene, as is often assumed.

Keywords: mental imagery, fMRI, functional connectivity, first-person perspective, Vantage Point, perspective, third-person perspective, visual imagery