 Is amodal completion a form of mental imagery then? Not everyone thinks so. One could argue that amodal completion is not a perceptual phenomenon at all, but rather a cognitive one: we see the unoccluded parts and then form beliefs about the occluded ones (see Briscoe 2011 for one version of this claim). There are two sorts of reasons to worry about this proposal. First, there are phenomenological worries: it just doesn’t feel as if we merely had beliefs about occluded parts of perceived objects (see, e.g., Noe 2004). Second, there are empirical problems. In particular, this way of thinking about amodal completion does not (and, arguably, could not) explain why the occluded contours show up in early cortical regions of perceptual processing and do so very quickly after stimulus presentation (Sekuler and Palmer 1992, Rauschenberger and Yantis 2001).