title: The imagination: cognitive, pre-cognitive, and meta-cognitive aspects.
abstract: This article is an attempt to situate imagination within consciousness complete with its own pre-cognitive, cognitive, and meta-cognitive domains. In the first sections we briefly review traditional philosophical and psychological conceptions of the imagination. The majority have viewed perception and imagination as separate faculties, performing distinct functions. A return to a phenomenological account of the imagination suggests that divisions between perception and imagination are transcended by precognitive factors of sense of reality and non-reality where perception and imagination play an indivisible role. In fact, both imagination and perception define sense of reality jointly according to what is possible and not possible. Absorption in a possible world depends on the strengths of alternative possibilities, and the relationship between core and marginal consciousness. The model may offer a parsimonious account of different states and levels of imaginal consciousness, and of how "believed-in imaginings" develop and become under some circumstances "lived-in experiences."
authors.affiliation: Centre de recherche Fernand-Seguin, 7331 Hochelaga St., Montréal, Que., Canada H1N 3V2. kieron.oconnor@crfs.umontreal.ca
authors.forename: Kieron P
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: O'Connor
authors.forename: Frederick
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Aardema
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D003243:Consciousness; D003244:Consciousness Disorders; D004325:Dreams; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D010465:Perception