ABSTRACT
It has been suggested (Kosslyn, Ganis, & Thompson, 2003), but is still a matter of debate (Pylyshyn, 2003), that imagery and perception rely on similar functional principles and activate an overlapping neural network. For example, the time it takes to mentally move between landmarks, referred to as Mental Image Scanning, increases with the distance between them, similar to when a person or object is actually moving along the route (Kosslyn, Ball, & Reiser, 1978). Recent fMRI studies suggest that the construction, maintenance, and manipulation of mental images depends on the functionality of the parietal lobe (e.g. Formisano et al., 2002).
