[Revised entry by Bence Nanay on January 12, 2026.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
If you close your eyes and visualize an apple, what you experience is mental imagery – visual imagery. But mental imagery is far more pervasive in our mental life than just visualizing. It happens in all sense modalities and it plays a crucial role not just in perception, but also in memory, emotions, language, desires and action-execution. It even plays a substantial role in our engagement with artworks, which makes it a key concept not only in philosophy of mind, but also in aesthetics….

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