The sixth William James Prize for Contributions to the Study of Consciousness was awarded to Dr Joel Pearson in Berlin, Germany, on the occasion of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.

The award was granted based on one of Dr Pearson's recent papers (Pearson, J., Clifford, C.W.G., Tong, F. (2008). The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception, Current Biology 18, 982-986) which shows that imagining a specific visual stimulus can strongly bias which of two subsequent competing stimuli reach awareness during binocular rivalry. Further, these effects of mental imagery are manifest all the way down to low-level perceptual representations, so suggesting that mere imagination can literally shape perceptual processing. A published commentary about the article noted that “the evidence can be considered the most compelling to date that imagery can be pictorial”.