Cognitive neuroscience of mental imagery: Methods and paradigms

Abstract

Over the last three decades, several new conceptual and experimental methods and paradigms have become available to cognitive scientists and neuroscientists to investigate mental imagery experimentally. This chapter critically reviews the strength and weaknesses of four classes of these methods and paradigm: behavioral, neuroimaging, electrophysiological, and brain stimulation. Behavioral paradigms provide researchers with powerful tools to explore and document mental imagery phenomena, but usually they cannot unambiguously determine the underlying neural processes. Neuroimaging and electrophysiological paradigms are often based on behavioral ones and complement them because they provide additional information about the brain mechanisms recruited by mental imagery that can be used to constrain theories. Finally, brain stimulation paradigms further complement the behavioral and neuroimaging methods by providing information about the causal role of postulated neural mechanisms in mental imagery. Systematic use of these kinds of methods and paradigms will dramatically increase our knowledge of mental imagery and enhance the sophistication of our theories, fostering a healthy scientific discovery cycle.