Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches to Mental Imagery

The book gathers work on mental imagery and on how the mind represents and processes it. One strand explains concreteness effects in memory for words in terms of shared and distinctive information. The argument is that this view fits many findings once taken to support dual coding.

The same account, the author contends, goes beyond earlier accounts of imagery and explains results that seem to contradict the idea that concrete and abstract material are stored in different forms in long-term memory. Imagery may still play a part in list learning and text comprehension, but language comprehension involves processes beyond modality-specific representations.

Several domains of imagery research presented at the European workshop gave grounds for testing this view, and some of the data sit more comfortably with imagery as process than with representational theories. The volume is part of the NATO Science Series D and is volume 42 in that series.