The Mind's Eye Mapped Onto the Brain's Matter

Abstract

Research on visual mental imagery has been fueled recently by the development of new behavioral and neuroscientific 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 between these two processes, there are data that qualify the degree of overlap between them. The second issue involves the neural substrate mediating the process of imagery generation. The data suggest a slight left-hemisphere advantage for this process, although there is considerable variability across and within subjects. There also remain many unanswered questions in this field, including what the relationship is between imagery and working memory and what representational differences, if any, exist between imagery and perception.