Andrea Blomkvist (University of Glasgow): ‘Mental Imagery: Vision in reverse?’

Abstract: Mental imagery is claimed to underlie a host of abilities, such as episodic memory, working memory, and decision-making. It purportedly does so by producing quasi-perceptual states, which guide abilities; for example, mental imagery of a party I attended cues my episodic recall of details of this party. A popular view holds that mental imagery relies on the perceptual system, so much so that it can be said to be ‘vision in reverse’. Whereas vision exploits the bottom-up neural pathways of the visual system, mental imagery exploits the top-down neural pathways. However, at the same time, researchers also acknowledge in a sentence or two that mental imagery takes input from episodic memory. But this claim is rarely further elaborated, and it seems at odds with thinking that mental imagery underlies episodic memory. In this talk, I aim to show that we first need to make a distinction between the system underwriting episodic memory, and the experience of episodic memory recall, whereby mental imagery could be seen as contributing to the latter, but not the former. Secondly, I aim to show that the episodic memory system plays a bigger role in the production of mental imagery than often acknowledged, by drawing on neuroscientific evidence from lesion studies, aphantasia studies, and episodic memory paradigms. I will conclude that doing so should make us question the whole ‘vision in reverse’ framework, and gesture towards an alternative story which ought to be further explored.

Andrea Blomkvist is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith Fellow at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience.