The Brain's Mind's Images: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Mental Imagery

Visual mental imagery is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. However, the scientific study of visual mental imagery has been difficult because it is intimately intertwined with an individual's inherently private phenomenology. Over the last two decades, powerful new methods have augmented the more traditional (behavioral and brain lesion) techniques for studying cognition in general and visual mental imagery in particular. In this chapter, we review convergent findings obtained by using multiple methods (studies of behavior, neuroimaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and deficits following brain damage) to investigate visual mental imagery. These findings support two general principles: (1) visual imagery shares many neural processes with visual perception, and (2) visual imagery is not a unitary process, but arises from the interaction of a host of subprocesses.