Mental Health, Behavioral Sciences, Neuroscience, General 

Visual and auditory imagery is "seeing" and "hearing" in the absence of immediate sensory input. Mental imagery is a central cognitive process and plays an important role in, for example, memory, spatial reasoning, skill learning and language comprehension. Interest in mental imagery has waxed and waned for centuries but is now enjoying a revival, fuelled by the emergence of new experimental methods and by new ways of conceptualizing the numerous component processes involved in mental imagery. As illustrated in this book, the confluence of these factors has produced a new wave of discoveries not only about the nature and function of imagery, but also about its neural bases. This book is divided into four main sections that cover some of the main areas of research in mental imagery: learning and memory, perception and action, information processing, and reasoning. In each section, the authors characterize mental imagery and then outline the neural basis of mental imagery through methods such as neuroimaging, neurophysiological case studies, and empirical studies with normal subjects. - from Amzon