this mental rotation finding implied that the human mind—and the human brain—maintains and manipulates mental images as topographic and topological wholes, an implication that was quickly put to test by psychologists. stephen kosslyn and colleagues showed in a series of neuroimaging experiments that the mental image of objects like the letter "f" are mapped, maintained and rotated as an image-like whole in areas of the human visual cortex. moreover, kosslyn's work showed that there are considerable similarities between the neural mappings for imagined stimuli and perceived stimuli. the authors of these studies concluded that, while the neural processes they studied rely on mathematical and computational underpinnings, the brain also seems optimized to handle the sort of mathematics that constantly computes a series of topologically-based images rather than calculating a mathematical model of an object.