AUTHOR=MacKisack Matthew , Aldworth Susan , Macpherson Fiona , Onians John , Winlove Crawford , Zeman Adam TITLE=On Picturing a Candle: The Prehistory of Imagery Science JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=7 YEAR=2016 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00515 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00515 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=
The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges to – the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task –