Mental Imagery

Mental imagery is typically defined as a perception-like representation that is brought about in the absence of an appropriate external stimulus. Philosophers have standardly taken our experience of mental imagery to be impoverished in comparison with perceptual experience, in some way decayed (Hobbes 1651/1968) or less vivid and forceful (Hume 1739/1985). But mental imagery has been nonetheless recognized as playing an important role in a variety of mental contexts—in memory, in both spatial and abstract reasoning, in problem-solving, and in future-planning, to name just a few. In the neuroscientific literature, considerable attention has been devoted to determining whether and to what extent the same neural pathways responsible for perception are also responsible for mental imagery. In the philosophical literature, relevant issues concern the representational nature of mental imagery, whether and to what extent introspection can shed light on the representational nature of mental imagery, how mental imagery differs across individuals, and the connection between mental imagery and imagination. After providing a historical background to the treatment of mental imagery in the philosophical literature, this article focuses on late 20th and early 21st century discussion of this topic and then briefly explores some of the future directions for mental imagery research.