Somesthetic mental imagery

The ability to create and manipulate images arising from our sense of touch has been far less investigated by the scientific community as compared to the same ability in the visual domain. Most of the studies that directly addressed this topic have compared performances in sighted and visually impaired individuals. Moreover, the large majority of these studies have investigated tactile mental imagery by using similar procedures to those previously adopted by studies of visual mental imagery. This approach has certainly led to important findings, but has also resulted in a scarcity of insights into certain important aspects that are peculiar to the tactile sense. In particular, the question related to the integration of all the different sources of information that enter tactile processing, such as signals from proprioception, pressure, thermic, and noxious receptors, has been largely neglected by the literature on mental imagery so far. This chapter critically discusses the results obtained by the extant research on tactile imagery, in an attempt to highlight its -limitations and to define the possible directions that will need to be explored by researchers in the future.