Imagery without Pictures

Lu Teng (Australian National University)

It is often assumed that visual imagery involves a phenomenal image that resembles a decaying perceptual experience. In this talk, I focus on forms of visual imagery whose phenomenology is not well characterized in these terms, which I call “schematic” imagery. First, I argue that schematic imagery is a pervasive feature of visual imagery in ordinary imagers. I then suggest that the notion of schematic imagery provides new insights into two other important psychological phenomena. One is amodal completion, for which an illustrative example is the perception of a cat partially behind the curtain. The other is aphantasia, in which some people report lacking visual imagery but perform well on a range of imagery-related tasks. My analysis of aphantasia builds on these arguments.