Visual Imagery: Emie M. Ono Clarice Atienza Genki Hirouchi
Visual Imagery: Emie M. Ono Clarice Atienza Genki Hirouchi
Visual Imagery: Emie M. Ono Clarice Atienza Genki Hirouchi
Emie M. Ono
Clarice Atienza
Genki Hirouchi
What is Visual Imagery?
• Mental imagery can be defined as pictures in the mind or a visual
representation in the absence of environmental input.
• Not everybody can conjure up mental images at will. Sir Francis Galton
discovered this in 1883 when he asked 100 people, including prominent
scientists, to form an image of their breakfast table from that morning.
Some had detailed images, others reported none at all.
Early ideas about Imagery:
• Wundt
- He is often regarded as the father of Psychology.
- He proposed that images were one of the three basic elements of
consciousness.
- Images accompany thought. Therefore, studying images was a way of
studying thinking.
• Imageless-thought debate
- The idea that there is a link between imagery and thinking.
- Provided evidence that imagery was not required for thinking through his
observation that people who have great difficulty forming visual images
are still capable of thinking.
• John Watson
- Founder of behaviorism.
- He described images as “unproven” and “mythological”.
• Allan Pavio
- Hypothesized the dual coding theory.
“Paired Associate Learning”
- the learning of syllables, digits, or words in pairs so that one member of
the pair evokes recall of the other.
Imagery and Perception
• Mental Scanning (Stephen Kosslyn)
- is an experimental technique that has been used to support the depictive
theory of imagery proposed by Kosslyn. Wherein subjects are asked
to scan across a mental image and the latency of the scan is measured.
• Spatial Representation
- Different parts of an image can be described as corresponding to specific
locations in space.
• Epiphenomenon (Pylyshyn)
- Something that accompanies the real mechanism but is not actually a part
of the mechanism.
• Propositional Representation
- Relationships can be represented by symbols.
• Spatial Representation
- The way in which space is represented in the brain.
• Depictive Representation
- Spatial relationships represented by pictures.
• Kosslyn’s experiment
- Size in the visual field
- Participants are asked to imagine animals next to each other and told them
to imagine that they were standing close enough to the larger animal so
that it filled most of their visual field.
Interactions of Imagery and Perception
• Cheves Perky
- She asked the participant to “project” visual images of common objects
onto a screen, and then to describe the images.
- Unbeknownst to the participants, Perky was back-projecting a very dim
image of this object onto the screen.
Fet or fMRI – used in the early 1990’s as a measurement tool on
a large number of brain imaging experiments.