Mental imagery is one important and powerful mechanism of human cognition that has been little explored in AI research. I present a computational framework for mental imagery which specifies the representational and inferential primitives needed to form an imagery-based reasoning system. I then present a computational model of mental imagery that uses a novel recursive memory structure that I c...

Optimism is associated with a range of benefits not only for general well-being, but also for mental and physical health. The development of psychological interventions to boost optimism derived from cognitive science would have the potential to provide significant public health benefits, yet cognitive markers of optimism are little understood. The current study aimed to take a first step in th...

Over the past 2 decades, much work has been carried out on the use of mental practice through motor imagery for optimizing the retraining of motor function in people with physical disabilities. Although much of the clinical work with mental practice has focused on the retraining of upper-extremity tasks, this article reviews the evidence supporting the potential of motor imagery for retraining ...

Recent multi-voxel pattern classification (MVPC) studies have shown that in early visual cortex patterns of brain activity generated during mental imagery are similar to patterns of activity generated during perception. This finding implies that low-level visual features (e.g., space, spatial frequency, and orientation) are encoded during mental imagery. However, the specific hypothesis that lo...

Imagery research typically deals with the commonalities and differences between imagery and perception. As such, it is usually confined to one specific modality. Yet, it is likely that some of the underlying processes are shared between different sensory modalities while others are modality-specific. In this fMRI study, we used a balanced design that allowed for a direct comparison between imag...

There is a vigorous debate as to whether visual perception and imagery share the same neuronal networks, whether the primary visual cortex is necessarily involved in visual imagery, and whether visual imagery functions are lateralized in the brain. Two patients with brain damage from closed head injury were submitted to tests of mental imagery in the visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, olfact...

This study implemented a systematic user-centered training protocol for a 4-class brain-computer interface (BCI). The goal was to optimize the BCI individually in order to achieve high performance within few sessions for all users. Eight able-bodied volunteers, who were initially naïve to the use of a BCI, participated in 10 sessions over a period of about 5 weeks. In an initial screening sessi...

The present study had two main goals: (1) to investigate the difference between perception and mental imagery using a visual illusion as a stimulus; (2) to inspect gender related differences in perception and imagery. Our main hypothesis, that there would be no differences between perception and mental imagery, was motivated by previous neuroimaging data. Unlike these neuroimaging studies that ...

We sought to provide direct evidence of the attention movements during dynamic mental imagery. Observers extrapolated in imagery the horizontal motion of a target with the gaze in central fixation. We recorded the steady-statevisual-evoked potentials (SSVEP) generated by flickering the left and right sides of the screen at two different frequencies. We found a consistent SSVEP modulation as a f...