Mental imagery is involved in a wide variety of cognitive abilities, including reasoning, spatial navigation, and memory. Cognitive aging is associated with impairments in these abilities, suggesting that diminished fidelity of mental images in older adults may be related to diverse cognitive deficits. However, an age-related deficit in mental imagery and its role in memory impairment is still ...

According to cognitive theories, verbal processing attenuates emotional processing, whereas visual imagery enhances emotional processing and contributes to the maintenance of social anxiety. Individuals with social anxiety report negative mental images in social situations. However, the general ability of visual mental imagery of neutral scenes in individuals with social anxiety is still unclea...

The neurobiological processes underlying mental imagery are a matter of debate and controversy among neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and biologists. Recent neuroimaging studies demonstrated that the execution of mental imagery activates large frontoparietal and occipitotemporal networks in the human brain. These previous imaging studies, however, neglected the crucial in...

We are able to extract detailed information from mental images that we were not explicitly aware of during encoding. For example, we can discover a new figure when we rotate a previously seen image in our mind. However, such discoveries are not "really" new but just new "interpretations." In two recent publications, we have shown that mental imagery can lead to perceptual learning (Tartaglia et...

OBJECTIVE Recent research has revealed a larger impairment of object perceptual discrimination than of spatial perceptual discrimination in patients with schizophrenia. It has been suggested that mental imagery may share processing systems with perception. We investigated whether patients with schizophrenia would show greater impairment regarding object imagery than spatial imagery. METHODS F...

Grounded cognition theory proposes that cognition, including meaning, is grounded in sensorimotor processing. The mechanism for grounding cognition is mental simulation, which is a type of mental imagery that re-enacts modal processing. To reveal top-down, cortical mechanisms for mental simulation of shape, event-related potentials were recorded to face and object pictures preceded by mental im...

Neuroimaging studies have described the functional neuroanatomy of mental imagery. Taken separately, specific studies vary in the nature of the task used and are limited by statistical power and sensitivity. We took advantage of a multistudy PET database of 54 subjects acquired in our laboratory to reveal the neural bases of spatial versus object mental imagery tasks. Our first goal was to eval...

Mental imagery, or the ability to simulate in the mind information that is not currently perceived by the senses, has attracted considerable research interest in psychology since the early 1970's. Within the past two decades, research in this field-as in cognitive psychology more generally-has been dominated by neuroscientific methods that typically involve comparisons between imagery performan...

In her target article Tina Iachini (2011) proposes to adopt an embodied multimodal approach to account for classical psychological and more recent neuroscientific results on mental imagery. Her proposal is challenging, and I share with the author the persuasion that the times are mature to introduce and defend an embodied approach to mental imagery. While the challenge has well known antecedent...