ABSTRACT
Stephen M. Kosslyn and his colleagues have offered a model whereby perception in the brain is largely a process of constructing sensory images, and that in turn constructing purely mental image without sense data makes use of the same basic brain systems. Movement through an environment, plus limited sense data from primitive receptors, required informational sensory processing that could order and form “an internal reckoning—a transient sensorimotor image—of what might be outside”. As the mental imagery begins to take shape, information is sent out of the visual cortex in two divergent streams, often referred to as the “what” and “where” streams. If generating mental images involves the recruitment of sensory-processing areas of the brain, as will be evidenced, then the question of unisensory or multisensory perception also becomes a question of imagination. Most discussion of multisensory processing to date has been concerned with those higher areas of the cortex associated with the final levels of integration of sensory information.
