Consciousness and cognition
October 1, 2025
Andy Mckilliam, Manuela Kirberg
5 citations
Mental imagery has traditionally been considered a conscious experience, but recent findings suggest it can occur unconsciously. People with aphantasia, who report no conscious imagery, often perform similarly to controls on imagery-requiring tasks, show imagery-based priming, and exhibit imagery-related neural activity in visual cortex. However, investigating unconscious imagery faces challenges: ensuring imagery is genuinely unconscious rather than unreported due to response biases, and clarifying how imagistic or indirect perceptual processing must be to qualify as imagery. This paper examines the evidence, argues it is less compelling than initially appears, and proposes a strategy for advancing research.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 5, 2026
Jennifer Windt, Manuela Kirberg, Tomas Andrillon
This special issue brings together theoretical and empirical work on dreaming and waking mind wandering, two areas with growing attention in cognitive neuroscience and psychology but limited philosophical exploration. Despite being studied separately, phenomenological and neurophysiological overlaps between waking mind wandering and sleep-related experiences indicate they are closely linked. These connections prompt questions about the nature and functions of spontaneous mental phenomena, their relationship to wakefulness and sleep, and implications for theories of attention, action, and consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2026
Manuela Kirberg, Jennifer Windt
Dreaming and mind wandering share features of spontaneous thought, but their precise relationship remains unclear. Bizarreness—unusual features of experience—has traditionally been seen as unique to dreams, though some propose it exists on a continuum where dreaming is an intensified form of mind wandering. Analyzing 379 spontaneous reports from the same participants in a naturalistic setting, the findings show that both dreaming and waking mind wandering have unique bizarreness profiles with similarities and differences. The comparison between the two changes depending on the type, subtype, and content of bizarreness measured. Thus, dreams cannot simply be described as intensified mind wandering; a more nuanced approach with specific measures is needed.