Editorial on the Research Topic Mental Imagery in Clinical Disorders Mental imagery refers to the simulation or recreation of perceptual experience across different sensory modalities (1, 2). The study of mental imagery has clinical relevance because such imagery has been increasingly shown to play a key role across various psychological disorders (3, 4). The current research topic presents a d...

Complex pictorial information can be represented and retrieved from memory as mental visual images. Functional brain imaging studies have shown that visual perception and visual imagery share common neural substrates. The type of memory (short- or long-term) that mediates the generation of mental images, however, has not been addressed previously. The purpose of this study was to investigate th...

One theory of visual mental imagery posits that early visual cortex is also used to support representations during imagery. This claim is important because it bears on the "imagery debate": Early visual cortex supports depictive representations during perception, not descriptive ones. Thus, if such cortex also plays a functional role in imagery, this is strong evidence that imagery does not rel...

When I am looking at my coffee machine that makes funny noises, this is an instance of multisensory perception - I perceive this event by means of both vision and audition. But very often we only receive sensory stimulation from a multisensory event by means of one sense modality, for example, when I hear the noisy coffee machine in the next room, that is, without seeing it. The aim of this pap...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of mental practice on motor imagery ability and assess the influence of motor imagery on gait rehabilitation in sub-acute stroke. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial. SUBJECTS A total of 44 patients with gait dysfunction after first-ever stroke were randomly allocated to a motor imagery training group and a muscle relaxation group. METHODS The motor imagery...

Vision and space are prominent modalities in our experiences as humans. We live in a richly visual world, and are constantly and acutely aware of our position in space and our surroundings. In contrast to this seemingly precise awareness, we are also able to reason abstractly, use language, and construct arbitrary hypothetical scenarios. In this position paper, we present an AI system we are bu...

Young adult and elderly Ss performed 4 visual mental imagery tasks, each of which tapped different processes. The elderly had relatively impaired image rotation and image activation (the process of accessing and activating stored visual memories), and there was a hint that aging may impair the ability to maintain images. In contrast, the elderly were able to compose (the process of generating t...

Visual- and motor imagery rely primarily on perceptual and motor processes, respectively. In healthy controls, the type of imagery used to solve a task depends on personal preference, task instruction, and task properties. But how does the chronic loss of proprioceptive and tactile sensory inputs from the body periphery influence mental imagery? In a unique case study, we investigated the image...