The Imagery Debate Exhumed and Reanimated

Recent years have seen little pushback on the pictorialist thesis that mental imagery occurs in an analog or iconic format. This paper challenges the status quo in developing new arguments to show how the phenomena most commonly cited in pictorialism’s favor—viz., participant response times during “mental rotation” and “mental scanning” tasks, and the retinotopic organization of cortical areas underlying visual imagery—fail to provide positive evidence for the thesis that mental imagery is analog or iconic in format. In addition, alternative explanations are provided for why we might see retinotopic activation in cortical areas underlying imagery, and why we would observe the relevant response times in rotation and scanning tasks, even if mental imagery did not occur in an analog format.