Current projects

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Frontiers in Mental Imagery

 

Mental imagery consists of perceptual processes that are not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulations in a given sense modality. 

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If we remember how we met a loved one, we sometimes see a visual image of how we first met them and this visual image can be accompanied by intense positive emotions. Similarly, we may vividly remember how it hurt when we were beaten up in the schoolyard and again this tactile image may come with intense negative emotions. 

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Consider thoughts of this sort to occur whilst driving the car, or whilst swimming. These would amount to instances of perceptual decoupling, that is the capacity to disengage attention from perception: an occurrence that often leads the mind to wander or to be blank even. In the second case, attention calls no perceptual inputs into conscious awareness.

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The ability to take explicit note of the current contents of consciousness, known as meta-awareness, is our concern. In particular, we are interested in non-propositional meta-awareness, or how are we capable of accessing the content of our mental states without relying on linguistic discourse.