 Wollheim (1980) said that what is distinctive about pictorial representation is its capacity to generate a certain kind of experience: the experience of “seeing the subject in the picture”. For many this has seemed to capture something deeply important about the nature of depictive representation, though Wollheim’s specific claims about it are disputed. What exactly is seeing-in? One subsequent suggestion has been that we see something, X, in a picture when we experience a resemblance between the outline shape visible in the picture and the outline shape that would be presented from that same perspective by X (Hopkins 1998; for a related proposal see Peacocke 1987). Another proposal is that we see X in a picture when we are prompted by it to imagine, of our act of seeing the picture, that it is a seeing of X (Walton 1992). Is cognitive science able to help us adjudicate between rival theories in this area? It does look as if these ostensibly philosophical theories are committing themselves, if somewhat vaguely, on empirical issues. Surely, we cannot settle from the armchair whether the perception of pictures draws on imaginative capacities. Scientists have gone a long way towards locating areas of the brain implicated in certain kinds of functions, emotion and the forms of perception being good examples. But we are not similarly able to localise imaginative activity and there may be an in-principle barrier to our doing so; there is some reason to suppose that there are not dedicated mechanisms of imaginative activity, but that imagining involves the reuse of systems designed for other purposes. This issue has been a central contention in the debate over how we understand the minds of other people, a debate originally drawn in terms of two opposing outlooks, theory-theory and simulation theory, though other approaches have come into view (Gallagher &amp; Hutto 2008). Theory-theory attributes to us a (perhaps tacit) theory of the mental states of others, their connection to action and so forth, from which we derive predictions and explanations of behaviour (Fodor 1992; Carruthers 1996). Simulationism, by contrast, argues that we have a capacity to use our own mental systems of inferring and deciding to model or simulate the thoughts and decisions of others (Gordon 1986). While Heal has emphasised what she takes to be the a priori principle that when we examine the thinking of another person we have to reproduce in our own minds the contents of and the logical relations between the propositions thought (1986), others have developed an empirically oriented version, postulating causal mechanisms by which practical and theoretical reasoning can be taken “off-line”, or disconnected from experiential inputs and behavioural outputs (A. I. Goldman 1989). It has been suggested that the simulation approach, understood largely in this empirically oriented way, enables us to explain a good deal about our interest in and responses to fiction (Currie &amp; Ravenscroft 2002). Questions about causally effective mental architecture have played a role in other aesthetic debates such as the explanation of our capacity to become immersed in a narrative (Schellenberg 2013) and of the contrary tendency to “resist” imaginative involvement with stories we perceive as morally or in other ways problematic (Weinberg &amp; Meskin 2006; Miyazono &amp; Liao 2016).