ABSTRACT
Psychology.—The human mind retains traces of the sensory events it perceives (→MIND). It is capable of evoking them in the form of inner experiences. These cognitive events, which are figurative in nature, are called mental images. The term mental imagery refers to the mechanisms by means of which individuals construct internal representations that preserve the figurative aspects of objects, record them in memory, and then cognitively reinstate them in future situations (→MEMORY, REPRESENTATION). All sensory domains are concerned with mental imagery, but most of the work done so far has dealt with visual imagery. The research is aimed first at providing evidence of the existence of imagebased psychological events, and then at describing their internal organization, examining their role in cognitive functioning, and, especially, characterizing the specificity of this form of representation in the human cognitive system.
