Mental Imagery

Reasoning about visual and spatial properties is a basic cognitive ability, important for everyday activities (arranging furniture, finding a friend's home) and technical domains (understanding a model molecule, performing endoscopic surgery). One possibility is that the brain uses a general-purpose processing engine to perform mental imagery. We have been exploring the alternative hypothesis, that multiple dissociable mechanisms contribute to mental imagery.

>> Zacks, J., Rypma, B., Gabrieli, J., Tversky, B., & Glover, G. (1999). Imagined transformations of bodies: an fMRI study. Neuropsychologia, 37, 1029-1040.

>> Zacks, J. M., Ollinger, J. M., Sheridan, M. A., & Tversky, B. (2002). A parametric study of mental spatial transformations of bodies. NeuroImage, 16, 857-872.

>> Zacks, J. M., Mires, J., Tversky, B., & Hazeltine, E. (2002). Mental spatial transformations of objects and perspective. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 2, 315-322.

>> Michelon, P. & Zacks, J. M. (2003). What is primed in priming from imagery? Psychological Research, 67, 71-79.

>> Zacks, J. M., Vettel, J. M., Michelon, P. (2003). Imagined Viewer and Object Rotations Dissociated with Event-Related fMRI. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 1002-1018.

>> Zacks, J. M., Gilliam, F., & Ojemann, J. G. (2003). Selective disturbance of mental rotation by cortical stimulation. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1659-1667.

>> Zacks, J. M., Michelon, P., Vettel, J. M., & Ojemann, J. G. (2004). Functional Reorganization of Spatial Transformations After a Parietal Lesion. Neurology, 63, 287-292. (supplementary materials)

>> Zacks, J. M., & Michelon, P. (2005). Transformations of visuospatial images. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 4, 96-118.

>> Zacks, J. M., & Tversky, B. (2005). Multiple systems for spatial imagery: Transformations of objects and bodies. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 5, 271-306.

>> Michelon, P., Vettel, J. M., & Zacks, J. M. (2006). Lateral somatotopic organization during imagined and prepared movements. Journal of Neurophysiology, 95, 811-822.

>> Michelon, P. & Zacks, J. M. (2006). Two kinds of visual perspective-taking. Perception and Psychophysics, 68, 327-337.

>> Zacks, J. M. (2008). Neuroimaging studies of mental rotation: A meta-analysis and review. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

For a more complete list, download Jeff Zacks's curriculum vitae.

Mental Imagery

St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

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