Mental Imagery: Functional Mechanisms and Clinical Applications

By Joel Pearson, Thomas Naselaris, Emily A. Holmes, Stephen M. Kosslyn. 2015

909 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 has demonstrated that neural representations of mental and perceptual images resemble one another as early as the primary visual cortex (V1). Activity patterns in V1 encode mental images and perceptual images via a common set of low-level depictive visual features. Recent translational and clinical research reveals the pivotal role that imagery plays in many mental disorders and suggests how clinicians can utilize imagery in treatment.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. João F. Henriques
2. Andrea Vedaldi
3. Tinne Tuytelaars
4. Xu Ji

Citations in the corpus

• Automatic Recall Machines: Internal Replay, Continual Learning and the Brain (2020, background): “In the brain, mental imagery is thought not to propagate to the retina [Pearson et al., 2015], which has led to the idea of replay from intermediate levels in neural networks [van de Ven et al.”