The Case for Mental Imagery

Kosslyn, Stephen M.; Thompson, William L.; Ganis, Giorgio

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195179088.001.0001

Cited by 574 publications

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“…Indeed, recent decades have witnessed an increasing integration of psychology and neuroscience roughly along the lines advocated here. Many psychologists have been moving away from less mechanistically constrained models towards models that take more and more neuroscientific constraints into account (e.g., Gazzaniga 2009, Kalat 2008, Kosslyn 2006, O'Reilly and Munakata 2000, Posner 2004). Our goal is to express one rationale for that trend: there is no kind of constitutive explanation of psychological phenomena that is distinct from mechanistic explanation, properly conceived.…”

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confidence: 99%

Integrating psychology and neuroscience: functional analyses as mechanism sketches

2011

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Synthese; Synthese is available online at:http://www.springer.com/philosophy/epistemology+and+philosophy+of+science/jou rnal/11229Abstract. We sketch a framework for building a unified science of cognition. This unification is achieved by showing how functional analyses of cognitive capacities can be integrated with the multilevel mechanistic explanations of neural systems. The core idea is that functional analyses are sketches of mechanisms, in which some structural aspects of a mechanistic explanation are omitted. Once the missing aspects are filled in, a functional analysis turns into a full-blown mechanistic explanation. By this process, functional analyses are seamlessly integrated with multilevel mechanistic explanations.1 This paper was refereed in two rounds. John Symons graciously arranged for a round of blind refereeing; thanks are due to him and the anonymous referees. In addition, thanks to those who refereed the paper non-blindly: Ken Aizawa, Robert Cummins, and Dan Weiskopf. Many thanks to audiences at the 2010 APA Pacific Division, Saint Louis University, and University of Missouri -Columbia. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-0924527 to Gualtiero Piccinini. 2 Integrating Psychology and Neuroscience via Multi-Level Mechanistic ExplanationWhen psychologists explain behavior, the explanations typically make reference to causes that precede the behavior and make a difference to whether and how it occurs.For instance, they explain that Anna ducked because she saw a looming ball. By contrast, when psychologists explain psychological capacities such as stereopsis or working memory, they typically do so by showing that these complex capacities are made up of more basic capacities organized together. In this paper, we focus exclusively on the latter sort of explanation, which is usually referred to as functional analysis. We argue that such decompositional, constitutive explanations gain their explanatory force by describing mechanisms (even approximately and with idealization) and, conversely, that they lack explanatory force to the extent that they fail to describe mechanisms.In arguing for this point, we sketch a framework for building a unified science of cognition. This unification is achieved by showing how functional analyses of cognitive capacities can be and in some cases have been integrated with the multilevel mechanistic explanations of neural systems. The core idea is that functional analyses are sketches of mechanisms, in which some structural aspects of a mechanistic explanation are omitted. Once the missing aspects are filled in, a functional analysis turns into a full-blown mechanistic explanation. By this process, functional analyses are seamlessly integrated with multilevel mechanistic explanations. 3The conclusion that functional analyses are mechanism sketches leads to a simple argument that psychological explanation is mechanistic. It is generally assumed that psychological explanation is functional-that it proceeds via t...

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Integrating psychology and neuroscience: functional analyses as mechanism sketches

2011

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“…First, the claim that imagery is nothing more than focused attention fails to account for the many mental imagery results found when participants' eyes are closed (see, for example, Kosslyn, Thompson & Ganis [2006] for a review). Although Pylyshyn's (1989Pylyshyn's ( , 1998Pylyshyn's ( , 2003 spatial indexing explanation might be considered plausible when eyes are open, it is unclear how such a system would work when no indexes were visible.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…There is also increasing evidence that both visual imagery (e.g., Kosslyn & Thompson, 2003;Kosslyn, Thompson & Ganis, 2006) and visual attention can lead to increased activity in early visual cortex (e.g., Silver, Ress, & Heeger, 2005), and attention may enhance performance of tasks that rely on this neural structure (e.g., Hopfinger & West, 2006). These results make it difficult to disentangle effects due to imagery versus attention (but, see Offen, Schluppeck & Heeger [2009] for evidence that attention and visual short-term memory rely on different processes in early visual cortex).…”

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Dissociation between visual attention and visual mental imagery

Thompson

Hsiao

Kosslyn

2011

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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Visual mental imagery (which involves generating and transforming visual mental representations, i.e., seeing with the mind's eye) and visual attention appear to be distinct processes. However, some researchers have claimed that imagery effects can be explained by appeal to attention (and thus, that imagery is nothing more than a form of attention). In this study, we used a size manipulation to demonstrate that imagery and attention are distinct processes. We reasoned that if participants are asked to perform each function (imagery and attention) using stimuli of two different sizes (large and small), and that stimulus size affects the two functions differently, then we could conclude that imagery and attention are distinct cognitive processes. Our analyses showed that participants performed the imagery task with greater facility at a large size, whereas attention was performed more easily using smaller stimuli. This finding demonstrates that imagery and attention are distinct cognitive processes.

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“…Le tecniche di neuroimaging, ad esempio, hanno fornito prove convergenti che hanno aiutato a risolvere il dibattito sulle immagini mentali sotto diversi aspetti (Kosslyn et al, 2006;Reed, 2010). Attualmente vi è un accordo sufficiente in tutte le aree della psicologia sulla legittimità del costrutto «immagine mentale» e sul suo ruolo nel complesso dell'attività psichica (Di Nuovo, 1999).…”

Section: Il Dibattito Sull'immagine Mentaleunclassified

L’«Embodied Cognition» dalla prospettiva delle neuroscienze

Sozzi¹

2015

Psychologica

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The Case for Mental Imagery

Cited by 574 publications

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Integrating psychology and neuroscience: functional analyses as mechanism sketches

Integrating psychology and neuroscience: functional analyses as mechanism sketches

Dissociation between visual attention and visual mental imagery

L’«Embodied Cognition» dalla prospettiva delle neuroscienze

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