Librería Portfolio

´This volume is the most important if not the final word on the great imagery debate. It examines issues critical to all cognition. For example, whether the brain is a general purpose computer and if the brain´s structure imposes limits on what can be represented in our minds.´ Michael I. Posner, Prof. Emeritus University of Oregon Features The imagery debate captured in this book is well-known, longstanding, and central to psychology and neuroscience The authors present a complete and unified argument for the idea that mental images do depict information, and that these depictions do play a functional role in human cognition By seamlessly weaving together conceptual analyses and the many and varied empirical findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, presenting the conceptual grounds for positing this type of internal representation, and summarizing and refuting arguments to the contrary, the authors´ argument serves as an historical review of the imagery debate and provides ample evidence that significant progress has been made in our understanding of mental imagery In illustrating how scientists think about one of the most difficult problems in psychology and neuroscience, this book goes beyond the debate it explicates to explore the nature of cognition and draw out implications for the study of consciousness. This book is a valuable resource for understanding not only the imagery debate, but also and more broadly, the nature of thought, and how theory and research shape the evolution of scientific debates.



Table of Contents:
1. Mental Images and Mental Representations -- 2. Evaluating Propositional Accounts -- 3. Evaluating Experimental Artifact Accounts -- 4. Depictive Representations in the Brain -- 5. Visual Mental Images in the Brain: Overview of a Theory -- 6. Science and Mental Imagery -- Appendix: Neuroimaging Studies of Visual Mental Imagery -- References -- Author Index -- Subject Index.