In this book, William Bechtel outlines a new and original program for the philosophy of cognitive science using an original concept of mechanism as its core idea. Bechtel’s concept of mechanism is intended to allow for a naturalized science of the mind that is continuous with the other sciences. Bechtel is a philosopher of science that is interested in how science is actually made and therefore...

This paper examines the role of mental imagery in music performance. Self-reports by musicians, and various other sources of anecdotal evidence, suggest that covert auditory, motor, and/or visual imagery facilitate multiple aspects of music performance. The cognitive and motor mechanisms that underlie such imagery include working memory, action simulation, and internal models. Together these me...

Mental models play an important and sometimes critical role in human-human interactions, in particular, in the context of human team tasks where humans need to interact with each other to achieve common goals. In this paper, we will describe some of the challenges involved in developing general computational mechanisms for mental models and their applications in the context human-robot interact...

Sensory cortices can be activated without any external stimuli. Yet, it is still unclear how this perceptual reactivation occurs and which neural structures mediate this reconstruction process. In this study, we employed fMRI with mental imagery paradigms to investigate the neural networks involved in perceptual reactivation. Subjects performed two speech imagery tasks: articulation imagery (AI...

Background: Infertility can lead to major bio-psychological disorders. Coping strategies help individuals adapt to unpredictable conditions in a systematic way. The present study aimed to determine the perceived stress of couples undergoing treatment for infertility, as well as their coping strategies and correlation between the studied variables and gender.  Methods: This was a cross-sectiona...

Mental imagery is an experience like perception in the absence of a percept. It is a ubiquitous feature of human cognition, yet it has been relatively neglected in the etiology, maintenance, and treatment of depression. Imagery abnormalities in depression include an excess of intrusive negative mental imagery; impoverished positive imagery; bias for observer perspective imagery; and overgeneral...

We want to build an agent that plans by imagining sequences of future states. Subjectively, these states seem very rich and detailed. Providing an agent with sufficiently rich knowledge about its world is an impediment to studying this kind of planning, so we have developed mechanisms for an agent to learn about its world. One mechanism learns dependencies between synchronous "snapshots" of the...

In this chapter a conceptual foundation of employing music in rehabilitation is highlighted. The basic assumption is that, when a person is involved in performing or listening to music, she has a comprehensive experience in which several mental registers are activated simultaneously. The specific effect of music is to trigger a coordinated action of motor, visuospatial and verbal mechanisms. Th...

A brain-damaged patient is described whose pattern of performance provides insight into both the functional mechanisms and the neural structures involved in visual mental imagery. The patient became severely agnosic, alexic, achromatopsic and prosopagnosic following bilateral brain lesions in the temporo-occipital cortex. However, her mental imagery for the same visual entities that she could n...

Depression as a kind of mental illness affects huge number of population worldwide and is ranked as the fourth leading cause of disability worldwide, and is predicted to increase to the second place by 2020. Depression leads to great social burden because of its substantial impairment and disability in everyday activities. Though great efforts in previous decades have been made to understand th...