Modalities and causal routes in music-induced mental imagery

In their Forum piece ‘Using music to probe how perception shapes imagination’, Margulis and McAuley [1] propose that imagination is more heavily shaped by immediate environmental cues and shared cultural experiences than previously thought. They review recent evidence demonstrating that narratives associated with music show high consistency within but not between cultures, and argue that individuals’ imaginings (i.e., thoughts or mental imagery in any sense modality) are shaped by immediate sensory input such as structural features of a specific piece of music.