Research on visual mental imagery has been fueled recently by the development of new behavioral and neurosci-entific techniques. This review focuses on two major topics in light of these developments. The first concerns the extent to which visual mental imagery and visual perception share common psychological and neural mechanisms; although the research findings largely support convergence betw...

Mental imagery research has weathered both disbelief of the phenomenon and inherent methodological limitations. Here we review recent behavioral, brain imaging, and clinical research that has reshaped our understanding of mental imagery. Research supports the claim that visual mental imagery is a depictive internal representation that functions like a weak form of perception. Brain imaging work...

OBJECTIVES Mental imagery abnormalities occur across psychopathologies and are hypothesized to drive emotional difficulties in bipolar disorder (BD). A comprehensive assessment of mental imagery in BD is lacking. We aimed to test whether (i) mental imagery abnormalities (abnormalities in cognitive stages and subjective domains) occur in BD relative to non-clinical controls; and (ii) to determin...

Our ability to be conscious of the world around us is often discussed as one of the most amazing yet enigmatic processes under scientific investigation today. However, our ability to imagine the world around us in the absence of stimulation from that world is perhaps even more amazing. Our capacity to re-experience objects or scenarios that we’ve encountered before, and to notice new things abo...

This paper (1) sketches a phenomenological analysis of visual mental imagery; (2) applies this analysis to the mental imagery debate in cognitive science; (3) briefly sketches a neurophenomenological approach to mental imagery; and (4) compares the results of this discussion with Dennett’s heterophenomenology.

The role of mental imagery has been puzzling researchers for more than two millennia. Both positive and negative effects of mental imagery on information processing have been discussed. The aim of this work was to examine how mental imagery affects object recognition and associative learning. Based on different perceptual and cognitive accounts we tested our imagery-induced interaction hypothes...

Objectives Drug related mental imagery is proposed to play a central role in addictive behaviour. However, little is known about such cognition or how it is pharmacologically modulated. Here, we test theoretical predictions of the 'elaborated intrusion' theory by comparing neutral with alcohol related mental imagery, and examine the effects of low dose alcohol on phenomenological aspects of thi...

background & aim: pain is a major problem after burn injury. therapeutic practices do not provide suffi-cient pain relief for patients with burn. therefore, non-pharmacological interventions such as muscle relaxa-tion and mental imagery can be effective in reducing pain. this study aimed to compare the effects of mus-cle relaxation and mental imagery techniques on pain intensity in patients wit...

One of the fundamental goals of object recognition research is to understand how a cognitive representation produced from the output of filtered and transformed sensory information facilitates efficient viewer behavior. Given that mental imagery strongly resembles perceptual processes in both cortical regions and subjective visual qualities, it is reasonable to question whether mental imagery f...

Simulation of imagery thinking has important significance for research and development of human intelligent systems. The breakthrough of computer simulation of imagery thinking is the simulation of mental imagery's memory mechanisms. In this study, a visual mental imagery memory model accord with working mechanism of declarative memory has been constructed. The new model has four layers. They a...