Perception and Imagery

Abstract

This chapter provides a general account of imagery that applies to both external senses such as vision and internal senses such as pain. It identifies five mental operations that occur in all kinds of imagery: intensification, focusing, combination, juxtaposition, and decomposition. Each of these operations results from neural mechanisms that are part of the Semantic Pointer Architecture, including storage, retrieval, neural representation, binding, competition, and transformation. There is abundant psychological and neural evidence that imagery is real and that the brain’s computations employ special patterns of neural representation that develop from sensory inputs. This development requires binding into semantic pointers that are susceptible to symbol-like manipulation that exploits the different sensory characters of visual, auditory, and other sorts of representation.