Abstract
Our ability to be conscious of the world around us is often discussed as one of the most amazing yet enigmatic processes under scientific investigation today. However, our ability to imagine the world around us in the absence of stimulation from that world is perhaps even more amazing. This talk will cover new methods for investigating mental imagery, its influence on visual perception, and its role in visual working memory. Mental imagery can have a pronounced facilitatory influence on subsequent conscious perception. Likewise, metacognitive reports of individual episodes of imagery can predict its influence on subsequent perception. These effects of imagery on conscious perception can also be used to predict an individual's ability to hold visual spatial information in working memory.