Image And Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate

By Stephen M. Kosslyn and Kosslyn

Book Overview

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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262611244
• ISBN13: 9780262611244
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 526 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 10.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

review of current thought in the field

Wanted to span the difference between pharmacology, biochemistry and the nuts and bolts approach. Kosslyn puts these into black boxes and gives the reader the "effect of" these black boxes. Specifically was looking for ideas from the psychology point of view that would point in directions into the coding and sequencing of information, not in the cognitive science or neural sense approach but the biophysical approach of identification of back round noise in low frequency entrainment and transfer of information through entropy from the "wet computer" side. A passage from Kosslyn caught my attention when he states that imformation was not stored like an array in a computer, but mapped to specific locations anatomically.