Review

Authors: Yuval Nir, Giulio Tononi

Dreams are a remarkable experiment in psychology and neuroscience, conducted every night in every sleeping person. They show that the human brain, disconnected from the environment, can generate an entire world of conscious experiences by itself. Content analysis and developmental studies have promoted understanding of dream phenomenology. In parallel, brain lesion studies, functional imaging and neurophysiology have advanced current knowledge of the neural basis of dreaming. It is now possible to start integrating these two strands of research to address fundamental questions that dreams pose for cognitive neuroscience: how conscious experiences in sleep relate to underlying brain activity; why the dreamer is largely disconnected from the environment; and whether dreaming is more closely related to mental imagery or to perception.

Topics: Brain; Consciousness; Dreams; Emotions; Environment; Humans; Imagination; Neurophysiology; Perception; Psychophysiology

PubMed: 20079677
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001

Review

Authors: Peter Zeidman, Eleanor A Maguire

The brain creates a model of the world around us. We can use this representation to perceive and comprehend what we see at any given moment, but also to vividly re-experience scenes from our past and imagine future (or even fanciful) scenarios. Recent work has shown that these cognitive functions--perception, imagination and recall of scenes and events--all engage the anterior hippocampus. In this Opinion article, we capitalize on new findings from functional neuroimaging to propose a model that links high-level cognitive functions to specific structures within the anterior hippocampus.

Topics: Animals; Hippocampus; Humans; Imagination; Memory, Episodic; Perception

PubMed: 26865022
DOI: 10.1038/nrn.2015.24

Authors: Adam Zeman, Michaela Dewar, Sergio Della Sala...

Topics: Humans; Imagery, Psychotherapy; Imagination; Surveys and Questionnaires; Task Performance and Analysis

PubMed: 26115582
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019

Review

Authors: Tamar Kushnir

Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this article, I argue for the central function of imagination in the development of social cognition in infancy and childhood. In Section 1, I review a work showing that even in the first year of life, social cognition can be viewed through a nascent ability to imagine the physical possibilities and physical limits on action. In Section 2, I discuss how imagination of what should happen is appropriately constrained by what can happen, and how this influences children's moral evaluations. In the final section, I suggest developmental changes in imagination-especially the ability to imagine improbable events-may have implications for social inference, leading children to learn that inner motives can conflict. These examples point to a flexible and domain-general process that operates on knowledge to make social meaning. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief.

Topics: Child; Cognition; Creativity; Humans; Imagination; Learning; Social Cognition

PubMed: 35633075
DOI: 10.1002/wcs.1603

Review

Authors: Johannes B Mahr, Penny van Bergen, John Sutton...

Episodic representations can be entertained either as "remembered" or "imagined"-as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribution should be distinguished from other metacognitive operations (such as reality monitoring) and propose that this attribution is a "cognitive gadget"-a distinctively human ability made possible by cultural learning. Cultural learning is a type of social learning in which traits are inherited through social interaction. In the case of mnemicity, one culturally learns to discriminate metacognitive "feelings of remembering" from other perceptual, emotional, action-related, and metacognitive feelings; to interpret feelings of remembering as indicators of memory rather than imagination; and to broadcast the interpreted feelings in culture- and context-specific ways, such as "I was there" or "I witnessed it myself." We review evidence from the literature on memory development and scaffolding, metacognitive learning and teaching, as well as cross-cultural psychology in support of this view before pointing out various open questions about the nature and development of mnemicity highlighted by our account.

Topics: Humans; Memory, Episodic; Mental Recall; Learning; Metacognition; Emotions; Imagination

PubMed: 36649218
DOI: 10.1177/17456916221141352

Review

Authors: Anna Abraham

The astounding capacity for the human imagination to be engaged across a wide range of contexts is limitless and fundamental to our day-to-day experiences. Although processes of imagination are central to human psychological function, they rarely occupy center stage in academic discourse or empirical study within psychological and neuroscientific realms. The aim of this paper is to tackle this imbalance by drawing together the multitudinous facets of imagination within a common framework. The processes fall into one of five categories depending on whether they are characterized as involving perceptual/motor related mental imagery, intentionality or recollective processing, novel combinatorial or generative processing, exceptional phenomenology in the aesthetic response, or altered psychological states which range from commonplace to dysfunctional. These proposed categories are defined on the basis of theoretical ideas from philosophy as well as empirical evidence from neuroscience. By synthesizing the findings across these domains of imagination, this novel five-part or quinquepartite classification of the human imagination aids in systematizing, and thereby abets, our understanding of the workings and neural foundations of the human imagination. It would serve as a blueprint to direct further advances in the field of imagination while also promoting crosstalk with reference to stimulus-oriented facets of information processing. A biologically and ecologically valid psychology is one that seeks to explain fundamental aspects of human nature. Given the ubiquitous nature of the imaginative operations in our daily lives, there can be little doubt that these quintessential aspects of the mind should be central to the discussion. Hum Brain Mapp 37:4197-4211, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Topics: Brain; Humans; Imagination; Models, Psychological

PubMed: 27453527
DOI: 10.1002/hbm.23300

Review

Authors: Adam Zeman

The vividness of imagery varies between individuals. However, the existence of people in whom conscious, wakeful imagery is markedly reduced, or absent entirely, was neglected by psychology until the recent coinage of 'aphantasia' to describe this phenomenon. 'Hyperphantasia' denotes the converse - imagery whose vividness rivals perceptual experience. Around 1% and 3% of the population experience extreme aphantasia and hyperphantasia, respectively. Aphantasia runs in families, often affects imagery across several sense modalities, and is variably associated with reduced autobiographical memory, face recognition difficulty, and autism. Visual dreaming is often preserved. Subtypes of extreme imagery appear to be likely but are not yet well defined. Initial results suggest that alterations in connectivity between the frontoparietal and visual networks may provide the neural substrate for visual imagery extremes.

Topics: Humans; Imagination; Memory, Episodic; Dreams

PubMed: 38548492
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.02.007

Review

Authors: Michael C Corballis

Cognition is heavily grounded in space. As animals that move in space, we travel both physically and mentally in space and time, reliving past events, imagining future ones, and even constructing imaginary scenarios that play out in stories. Mental exploration of space is extraordinarily flexible, allowing us to zoom, adopt different vantage points, mentally rotate, and attach objects and sense impressions to create events, whether remembered, planned, or simply invented. The properties of spatiotemporal cognition depend on a hippocampal-entorhinal circuit of place cells, grid cells and border cells, with combinations of grid-cell modules generating a vast number of potential spatial remappings. The generativity of language, often considered one of its defining properties, may therefore derive not from the nature of language itself, but rather from the generativity of spatiotemporal scenarios, with language having evolved as a means of sharing them. Much our understanding of the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit is derived from neurophysiological recording in the rat brain, implying that the spatiotemporal cognition underpinning language has a long evolutionary history.

Topics: Animals; Cognition; Hippocampus; Humans; Imagination; Language; Models, Neurological; Space Perception

PubMed: 30123931
DOI: 10.1007/s10339-018-0878-1

Review

Authors: Daniel L Schacter, Donna Rose Addis, Demis Hassabis...

During the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in research examining the role of memory in imagination and future thinking. This work has revealed striking similarities between remembering the past and imagining or simulating the future, including the finding that a common brain network underlies both memory and imagination. Here, we discuss a number of key points that have emerged during recent years, focusing in particular on the importance of distinguishing between temporal and nontemporal factors in analyses of memory and imagination, the nature of differences between remembering the past and imagining the future, the identification of component processes that comprise the default network supporting memory-based simulations, and the finding that this network can couple flexibly with other networks to support complex goal-directed simulations. This growing area of research has broadened our conception of memory by highlighting the many ways in which memory supports adaptive functioning.

Topics: Animals; Brain; Humans; Imagination; Memory; Time Factors

PubMed: 23177955
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.11.001

Authors: Nadine Dijkstra, Stephen M Fleming

Humans are voracious imaginers, with internal simulations supporting memory, planning and decision-making. Because the neural mechanisms supporting imagery overlap with those supporting perception, a foundational question is how reality and imagination are kept apart. One possibility is that the intention to imagine is used to identify and discount self-generated signals during imagery. Alternatively, because internally generated signals are generally weaker, sensory strength is used to index reality. Traditional psychology experiments struggle to investigate this issue as subjects can rapidly learn that real stimuli are in play. Here, we combined one-trial-per-participant psychophysics with computational modelling and neuroimaging to show that imagined and perceived signals are in fact intermixed, with judgments of reality being determined by whether this intermixed signal is strong enough to cross a reality threshold. A consequence of this account is that when virtual or imagined signals are strong enough, they become subjectively indistinguishable from reality.

Topics: Humans; Imagination; Imagery, Psychotherapy; Learning; Computer Simulation; Psychophysics

PubMed: 36959279
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37322-1