или посто mental images

Образ в философии, результат и идеальная форма отражения объекта в сознании человека, возникающая в условиях общественно-исторической практики, на основе и в форме знаковых систем. На чувственной ступени познания образами являются ощущения, восприятия и представления, на уровне логического мышления — понятия, суждения и умозаключения. О. имеет своим объективным источником предметы и явления материального мира; в этом смысле О. вторичен по отношению к своему оригиналу. Материальный субстрат О. — соответствующие нейрофизиологические процессы, протекающие в коре головного мозга человека или животного. Материальной формой воплощения О. выступают практические действия, язык, различные знаковые модели. Специфической формой О. является художественный образ.
А. Г. Спиркин.

Mental Imagery

Mental imagery is a familiar aspect of most people's everyday experience (Galton, 1880; Betts, 1909; Doob, 1972; Marks, 1972, 1999). A few people may insist that they rarely, or even never, consciously experience imagery (Galton, 1880, 1883; Faw, 1997, 2009; but see Brewer & Schommer-Aikins, 2006), but for the vast majority of us, it is a familiar and commonplace feature of our mental lives. The English language supplies quite a range of idiomatic ways of referring to visual mental imagery: ‘visualizing,’ ‘seeing in the mind's eye,’ ‘having a picture in one's head,’ ‘picturing,’ ‘having/seeing a mental image/picture,’ and so on. There seem to be fewer ways to talk about imagery in other sensory modes, but there is little doubt that it occurs, and the experiencing of imagery in any sensory mode is often referred to as ‘imagining’ (the appearance, feel, smell, sound, or flavor of something). Alternatively, the quasi-perceptual nature of an experience may be indicated merely by putting the relevant sensory verb (‘see,’ ‘hear,’ ‘taste,’ etc.) in actual or implied “scare quotes.”

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/

Another way in which the expression ‘mental imagery’ (together with many of its colloquial near-equivalents) may be misleading, is that it tends to suggest only quasi-visual phenomena. Despite the fact that most scholarly discussions of imagery, in the past and today, do indeed focus mainly or exclusively upon the visual mode, in fact, quasi-perceptual experience in other sensory modes is just as real, and, very likely, just as common and just as psychologically important (Newton, 1982). Contemporary cognitive scientists generally recognize this, and interesting studies of auditory imagery, kinaesthetic (or motor) imagery, olfactory imagery, haptic (touch) imagery, and so forth, can be found in the recent scientific literature (e.g., Segal & Fusella, 1971; Reisberg, 1992; Klatzky, Lederman, & Matula, 1991; Jeannerod, 1994; Bensafi et al., 2003). Although such studies are still vastly outnumbered by studies of visual imagery, ‘imagery’ has become the generally accepted term amongst cognitive scientists for quasi-perceptual experience in any sense mode (or any combination of sense modes).

{1} quasi-perceptual conscious experience per se;
{2} hypothetical picture-like representations in the mind and/or brain that give rise to {1};
{3} hypothetical inner representations of any sort (picture-like or otherwise) that directly give rise to {1}.