Autonomic challenge uncovers hidden link between diastolic blood pressure and mental imagery vividness

Mental imagery is viewed as a fundamental component of human cognition, supporting memory, emotional processing, future simulation, and conscious experience. Although mental imagery vividness has traditionally been attributed to differences in sensory processing, emerging evidence suggests that internally generated images are also shaped by ongoing bodily and interoceptive signals. Here, we investigated whether cardiovascular physiology contributes to individual differences in mental imagery vividness using a virtual reality paradigm in which participants encoded and reconstructed emotional and neutral scenes during a tilt-table-induced autonomic challenge. Acute autonomic changes induced by a tilt table did not alter imagery vividness. However, elevated diastolic blood pressure during the tilt-up condition predicted reduced mental imagery vividness, with the strongest effects observed for disgust and neutral imagery. Our findings provide direct evidence that the vividness of the "minds eye" is linked to cardiovascular physiology and support interoceptive accounts of consciousness in which mental imagery emerges from dynamic interactions between neural and bodily systems. More broadly, these results identify cardiovascular function as a potential physiological contributor to altered imagery experiences, including those observed in aphantasia and related clinical conditions. Significance statementVisual mental imagery has traditionally been explained as a top-down process driven by the brain. We investigated whether bottom-up physiological signals from the cardiovascular system also contribute to imagery vividness. An autonomic challenge revealed a hidden relationship between diastolic blood pressure and the vividness of emotional mental imagery, indicating that ongoing cardiovascular signals influence internally generated visual experiences. These findings identify bottom-up autonomic physiology as a previously unrecognized contributor to mental imagery and broaden current understanding of how top-down and bottom-up processes interact to shape conscious mental imagery experience.