Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate

"Image and Brain attempts what is rarely seen in cognitive The Big Picture. To be sure, it is Kosslyn's Big Picture, but that is probably the best there is."-- Irving Biederman, William M. Keck Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Southern California. This long-awaited work by prominent Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn integrates a twenty-year research program on the nature of high-level vision and mental imagery. Image and Brain marshals insights and empirical results from computer vision, neuroscience, and cognitive science to develop a general theory of visual mental imagery, its relation to visual perception, and its implementation in the human brain. It offers a definitive resolution to the long-standing debate about the nature of the internal representation of visual mental imagery. Kosslyn reviews evidence that perception and representation are inextricably linked, and goes on to show how "quasi-pictorial" events in the brain are generated, interpreted, and used in cognition. The theory is tested with brain- scanning techniques that provide stronger evidence than has been possible in the past.Known for his work in high-level vision, one of the most empirically successful areas of experimental psychology, Kosslyn uses a highly interdisciplinary approach. He reviews and integrates an extensive amount of literature in a coherent presentation, and reports a wide range of new findings using a host of techniques.A Bradford Book