Phantom perception: voluntary and involuntary nonretinal vision

• Phantom vision includes mental imagery, hallucinations, and perceptual filling-in.
• We review behavioral, imaging, and physiology data on nonretinal phantom vision.
• We propose a dichotomous framework for phantom vision: voluntary and involuntary.

Hallucinations, mental imagery, synesthesia, perceptual filling-in, and many illusions are conscious visual experiences without a corresponding retinal stimulus: what we call ‘phantom perception’. Such percepts show that our experience of the world is not solely determined by direct sensory input. Some phantom percepts are voluntary, whereas others are involuntarily, occurring automatically. Here, by way of review, we compare and contrast these two types of phantom perception and their neural representations. We propose a dichotomous framework for phantom vision, analogous to the subtypes of attention: endogenous and exogenous. This framework unifies findings from different fields and species, providing a guide to study the constructive nature of conscious sensory perception.