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Crossmodal Mental Imagery

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Multisensory Imagery

Abstract

While researchers have long pondered over the nature (and even the very existence) of visual mental imagery, it is only in the last few decades or so that serious scientific research has been devoted to the study of this phenomenon in modalities other than vision. That said, the available empirical evidence now supports the view that mental imagery can occur in any sensory modality, though with widely varying degrees of vividness. It is at this point, then, that the question arises as to whether there might also be such a thing as crossmodal imagery. Crossmodal mental imagery has most commonly been reported under those conditions in which the presentation of a stimulus in one sensory modality results in the formation of a mental image in another modality. In this review, evidence supporting the existence of crossmodal mental imagery in neurologically normal adults is critically evaluated. Furthermore, similarities and differences with related phenomena such as crossmodal sensory forms of synaesthesia and crossmodal perceptual completion are also discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is legitimate to ask for a more precise definition of vividness. One might say that vividness refers to how rich and “reportable on” (e.g. how detailed) the image is (see Baddeley and Andrade 2000; Stevenson and Case 2005). However, according to an alternative view, it has been argued that the vividness of a mental image may actually correspond to how conscious one is of it. That is, the suggestion here is that we should treat vividness, or consciousness, as a continuous variable, rather than a discrete choice between something being either conscious or not (see Baars 1996, p. 262; though see Peirce 1935, vol. 6, §222 who argues that we need both vividness and what this vividness affects, i.e. a certain conscious quality or quale).

  2. 2.

    Olivetti Belardinelli et al. (2004, 2009) observed that higher associative areas located in the fusiform gyrus (BA 37) and inferior parietal lobule (BA 40) were activated when their participants were instructed to construct mental images based on sentences that they read. Additionally, putatively “modality-specific” cortical areas (see Ghazanfar and Schroeder 2006) also exhibited increased neural activity (e.g. gustatory cortex in response to gustatory imagery; see also Fallgatter et al. 1997). What is not yet known, but which seems at least intuitively plausible, is whether the common areas of neural activation simply reflect the common act of decoding the written sentences that participants were engaged in prior to eliciting a mental image in a particular sensory modality. The actual generation of the images (i.e. rather than the interpretation of the written instructions) then gave rise to patterns of neural activation that were more tightly linked to the relevant modality-specific cortical areas.

  3. 3.

    Intons-Peterson (1992, p. 50) reports that people commonly report “seeing” mental images in addition to “hearing” them. She continues “In fact, for some stimuli, such as ‘popcorn popping,’ many participants said that they had to ‘see’ the popcorn popping before they ‘heard’ it!” Whether such reports can be taken as providing evidence of the existence of crossmodal mental imagery resulting from a mental image being generated in a different modality (i.e. rather than as the result of the physical stimulation of another modality) lies beyond the scope of this chapter. There may also be a fruitful connection to be made here to the literature on the spreading of attention across the various unisensory features of audiovisual object representations (see Busse et al. 2005; Fiebelkorn et al. 2010).

  4. 4.

    We will not delve further into this difficult example here given the problem of knowing whether the influence of olfaction on taste should be treated as crossmodal or else merely as components of a unified flavour sense (Auvray and Spence 2008). Note also that experts have been reported to be able to exert some degree of voluntary control over whether or not this form of integration takes place (see Peynaud 1996; Smith 2007).

  5. 5.

    As an aside here, it is worth noting that an alternative interpretation of the crossmodal brain activations of putatively visual areas under conditions of tactile/haptic stimulation in terms of crossmodal mental imagery has kept many a neuroimager awake at night over the years (e.g. see Hagen et al. 2002, p. 962; Lacey and Sathian 2012, p. 180, and Chap. 14 this volume; Ptito et al. 2005, p. 611). This suggests the reality of crossmodal imagery to many of the researchers in the field or, if not to the researchers themselves, then, at least to the reviewers of their papers. See Sathian et al. (2004) for intriguing evidence concerning how one might discriminate the crossmodal imagery account from other explanations using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and/or event-related potential (ERP) evidence.

  6. 6.

    It is certainly true that visual object imagery seems to be more closely linked to haptic shape perception under those conditions in which the objects themselves are familiar to the participants under study (see Lacey et al. 2010). Indeed, in certain other cases (e.g. as when visualising the face associated with the voice that we happen to be listening to), the occurrence of crossmodal mental imagery (or crossmodally induced neural activation) seems to be more task-dependent than in others (see von Kriegstein et al. 2005; see also Royet et al. 1999). Once again, we believe that resolving the extent to which crossmodal mental imagery is externally versus internally generated, as well as clarifying the role of vividness, resolvability, and familiarity, will all likely constitute fruitful direction for future research.

  7. 7.

    Inclusion of the term “sensory” when discussing synaesthesia is necessary here to distinguish those forms of synaesthesia that are triggered by sensory inducers (and which are of interest here) from more “conceptual” forms of synaesthesia, where the synaesthetic concurrent is triggered by words (Simner 2007), personality traits (Riggs and Karwoski 1934; Ward 2004), and/or even swimming styles (e.g. Nikolić et al. 2011). Others use different terms to highlight this distinction—Day (2005), for example, distinguishes between “synaesthesia proper” and “cognitive” or “category synaesthesia” (see also Novich et al. 2011).

  8. 8.

    Of course, the notion of idiosyncracy isn’t especially well defined here. It is unclear, for instance, whether what is being talked about is idiosyncracy in terms of the nature (or subject matter) of the concurrent, the frequency of occurrence of the concurrent in the population, or both. Our view is that cases of mirror-touch synaesthesia (e.g. Banissy et al. 2009; Banissy and Ward 2007; Blakemore et al. 2005; see also Gates and Hupé 2011) seem to muddy the waters somewhat here.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Juan Botero, Fiona Macpherson, and Barry Smith for comments on an oral presentation of this chapter given at the British Academy Anglo-Colombian workshop held in Bogota, Colombia, on February, 2012. O.D. is funded by an FP7 Marie Curie grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3UD, UK

    Charles Spence

  2. Centre for the Study of the Senses, Institute of Philosophy, University of London, London, UK

    Ophelia Deroy

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  1. Charles Spence
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  2. Ophelia Deroy
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Correspondence to Charles Spence .

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  1. , Department of Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine, WOODRUFF CIRCLE WMB 6207 101, ATLANTA, 30329, Georgia, USA

    Simon Lacey

  2. , School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool, L69 7ZA, Montserrat

    Rebecca Lawson

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Spence, C., Deroy, O. (2013). Crossmodal Mental Imagery. In: Lacey, S., Lawson, R. (eds) Multisensory Imagery. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5879-1_9

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