Mats Küssner: "Music and mental imagery: Exploring the routes from perception to imagination"

Mats Küssner, Humboldt University of Berlin: "Music and mental imagery: Exploring the routes from perception to imagination"

Abstract
In the field of music cognition, mental imagery (i.e., quasi-perceptual experience in the absence of the corresponding external sensory input) has mainly been studied with a focus on auditory imagery. Recent research shows, however, that other modalities such as visual mental imagery (i.e., seeing images in one’s mind’s eye) play an important role in the experience of music listening too. In this presentation, I will give an overview of new empirical studies on music-induced visual mental imagery, addressing some basic questions such as its content, function, relation to emotion, neurophysiological correlates, and relationship with synaesthesia. The main argument is that music cognition is a multimodal phenomenon that provides a fruitful model to investigate the routes from perception to imagination.