The mechanism of forward angle incoherent photoproduction of pseudoscalar mesons off nuclei is revisited via the time-dependent multicollisional Monte Carlo (MCMC) intranuclear cascade model. Our results-combined with recent developments to address coherent photoproduction-reproduce with good accuracy recent JLab data of π 0 photoproduction from carbon and lead at an average photon energy k ∼ 5.2 GeV. For the case of η photoproduction, our results for k = 9 GeV suggest that future measurements

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... o extract the η → γ γ decay width via the Primakoff method should be focused on light nuclei, where the disentanglement between the Coulomb and strong amplitudes is more easily achieved. The prospects to use heavy nuclei data to access the unknown ηN cross section in cold nuclear matter are also presented.