Images of time: temporal aspects of auditory and movement imagination

Frontiers in Psychology

Rebecca S. Schaefer¹ 

关键词: auditory imagery;    motor imagery;    temporal processing;    expertise;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00877

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Research on mental imagery has shown that when we imagine something, the related neural processes overlap with those related to actually perceiving or performing that same percept or action (Kosslyn et al., 2001). Although visual imagery has long been the dominant modality for the investigation of sensory imagery, involvement of modality-specific brain regions (i.e., visual areas being implicated in visual imagery, and so on) has now also been reported for auditory, olfactory and tactile imagery (Halpern, 2001; Plailly et al., 2012; Schmidt et al., 2014). Movement or action imagery has informed theories of action representation (Jeannerod and Decety, 1995) and has recently gained interest in the context of mental practice for expert skill acquisition such as sports or surgery (Cocks et al., 2014) and movement rehabilitation (Malouin and Richards, 2010). Increasingly, the neural underpinnings of imagery have become clearer, and both modality-specific and modality-unspecific neural activations related to imagery have been found (Daselaar et al., 2010; Zvyagintsev et al., 2013). However, the growing body of neuroimaging literature on imagination has yet to include an account of temporal imagery. Although the reproduction of time intervals has been a research topic of interest, the contribution of temporal imagery—namely internal timekeeping or creating the temporal aspects of imagery in other modalities—is largely unexplored. As such it is unclear whether, similar to other perceptual modalities, imagery for time shares cerebral substrate with brain networks involved in time perception or regularity detection. Specifically for actions or sounds, the temporal structure of the imagined stimulus or action is crucial in conjuring a faithful image, suggesting that in scientific findings of auditory and motor imagery, temporal imagery is included. The temporal patterns we create internally arguably lie at the basis of any self-paced movement, be it a fast sprint, a musical performance, or an easy walk in the park. Here, I argue that the shared components between movement and auditory (specifically music) imagery may offer a window into timing and temporal skills, which may carry cognitive importance beyond movement or auditory functions.

【 授权许可】

CC BY