OPEN PEER COMMENTARY-TARGET ARTICLE Mental imagery and embodied cognition: a multimodal approach.

The aim of this paper is to describe several models in cognitive science that develop the idea of embodied cognition and to discuss the role of mental imagery in the embodied view of mind. After a brief introduction on the imagery debate, with specific emphasis on visual imagery, the paper will focus on the meaning of embodied simulation in its various forms. A possible shift from mental imagery as a unimodal, primarily visual, percept-like inner phenomenon to mental imagery as a multimodal, dynamic phenomenon based on sensorimotor conscious simulation will be discussed. It is proposed that mental imagery is an instance of embodied cognition which shares two ideas with the broader embodied cognition paradigm: namely, that cognitive processes are based on modal information as opposed to amodal abstract symbols; and that cognition is grounded in sensorimotor experiences rather than based on inner mental representations transducing perceptual information and re-creating the external world.