Visual Imagery Notes

Visual Imagery

  • Visual imagery involves "seeing" objects or scenes in the absence of a visual stimulus. For instance, recalling a panoramic view or imagining Susan's book on the desk.

Imagery in the History of Psychology

  • Wilhelm Wundt's Contribution:

    • Wundt, the founder of the first psychology laboratory, considered images one of the three basic elements of consciousness, along with sensations and feelings.
    • He believed studying images was a way to study thinking, as images accompany thought.

  • The Imageless Thought Debate:

    • Some psychologists agreed with Aristotle that "thought is impossible without an image."
    • Others argued that thinking could occur without images.
    • Francis Galton (1883) noted that people with aphantasia (difficulty forming visual images) could still think and problem-solve, which opposed the necessity of imagery for thought.

  • Behaviorism's Impact:

    • Behaviorism, led by John Watson, dismissed imagery as unproductive because visual images are subjective and not observable.
    • Watson described images as "unproven" and "mythological" (1928), leading to the decline of imagery studies from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Imagery and the Cognitive Revolution

  • Rebirth of Cognitive Psychology:

    • The cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 1960s saw the development of methods to measure behavior to infer cognitive processes.

  • Paivio's Work on Memory (1963):

    • Alan Paivio demonstrated that concrete nouns (e.g., truck, tree) are easier to remember than abstract nouns (e.g., truth, justice) due to the ease of imagining them.
    • This relates to the picture superiority effect.

  • Shepard and Metzler's Mental Rotation Experiment (1971):

    • Participants determined if two pictures were of the same object, with varying angles between the views.
    • The time taken to decide was directly related to the angle difference, suggesting mental rotation of one view to match the other.
    • This experiment provided quantitative methods to study imagery.
    • It also suggested that imagery and perception might share the same mechanisms.
    • Evidence for the visuospatial sketchpad, one of the storage components of Baddeley's working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 2000a).

Imagery and Perception: Shared Mechanisms?

  • Spatial Correspondence:

    • Shepard and Metzler's (1971) experiment indicated that spatial experience for both imagery and perception aligns with the actual stimulus layout.

  • **Kosslyn's Mental Scanning Experiments:
    ** * Stephen Kosslyn's research showed the spatial nature of imagery through mental scanning experiments.

    • In one experiment (Kosslyn, 1973), participants memorized a picture (e.g., a boat) and were asked to focus on one part (e.g., the flag pole) and then look for another part (e.g., the anchor).
    • The time taken to