Replaying the Movie in Your Mind Decoding Dynamic Visual Perception and Recall from EEG

Decoding dynamic visual content from EEG has advanced rapidly for visual perception, yet it remains unclear which aspects of neural representations are preserved when people internally replay dynamic scenes. We introduce PAIR, an EEG benchmark collected from 20 participants using an interleaved, clip-wise paradigm that pairs naturalistic video viewing with immediate visual recall. This design enables a comparison between externally driven perception and internally generated recall for the same stimulus content within a fixed trial sequence. We benchmark multiple decoding models on hierarchical semantic classification at both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels, meta-feature decoding tasks covering motion, color, object number, face, and human presence, and a state-decoding task that discriminates perception from recall. Within-subject validation results show numerically similar performance for several model--task combinations, alongside higher perception accuracy in two coarse-grained comparisons after multiple-comparison correction. In contrast, perception and recall are highly separable at the state level under the present validation protocol. State accuracy remains high after alpha-band ablation, although this does not exclude ocular or other task-related contributions.