 As a result, in recent decades psychologists and neuroscientists, rather than relying on introspection and phenomenology, characterized mental imagery in functional and neuroscientific terms. Here is a typical characterization from a review article that summarizes the state of the art concerning mental imagery in psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience, published in the flagship journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences: “We use the term ‘mental imagery’ to refer to representations […] of sensory information without a direct external stimulus” (Pearson et al. 2015, p. 590, see also Dijkstra et al. 2019). In short, according to the psychological definition, mental imagery is perceptual representation not triggered directly by sensory input (or representation-involving perceptual processing not triggered directly by sensory input – these two phrases will be used interchangeably in what follows).