A meta-analytic review of multisensory imagery identifies the neural correlates of modality-specific and modality-general imagery

By Chris McNorgan. 2012

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The relationship between imagery and mental representations induced through perception has been the subject of philosophical discussion since antiquity and of vigorous scientific debate in the last century. The relatively recent advent of functional neuroimaging has allowed neuroscientists to look for brain-based evidence for or against the argument that perceptual processes underlie mental imagery. Recent investigations of imagery in many new domains and the parallel development of new meta-analytic techniques now afford us a clearer picture of the relationship between the neural processes underlying imagery and perception, and indeed between imagery and other cognitive processes. This meta-analysis surveyed 65 studies investigating modality-specific imagery in auditory, tactile, motor, gustatory, olfactory, and three visual sub-domains: form, color and motion. Activation likelihood estimate (ALE) analyses of activation foci reported within- and across sensorimotor modalities were conducted. The results indicate that modality-specific imagery activations generally overlap with—but are not confined to—corresponding somatosensory processing and motor execution areas, and suggest that there is a core network of brain regions recruited during imagery, regardless of task. These findings have important implications for investigations of imagery and theories of cognitive processes, such as perceptually-based representational systems.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems, Social Psychology, Neuroscience

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Ben Alderson-Day
2. Charles Fernyhough
3. P. Moseley
4. Simon McCarthy-Jones
5. Susanne Weis
6. David Smailes

In Sensory Systems

1. Ben Alderson-Day
2. Charles Fernyhough

In Social Psychology

1. Ben Alderson-Day
2. Simon McCarthy-Jones
3. P. Moseley
4. Charles Fernyhough
5. Susanne Weis
6. David Smailes
7. Simon R. Jones
8. E. Meins

In Neuroscience

1. Ben Alderson-Day
2. Simon McCarthy-Jones
3. Charles Fernyhough

Citations in the corpus

• Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology (2015, positive): “The involvement of parietal cortex is also consistent with findings from studies of mental imagery in other modalities, which often involve recruitment of the superior and inferior parietal lobules (McNorgan, 2012).”
• The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization (2017, unknown): “(not labeled), somatosensory cortex (SSC), and MC during scenario immersion replicated prior simulation research (McNorgan, 2012) and established the validity of the”
• The brain’s conversation with itself: neural substrates of dialogic inner speech (2015, background): “For instance, mental rotation tasks involve demands to generate and flexibly manipulate mental images, and are consistently associated with activation in a network of frontoparietal regions (McNorgan, 2012).”