Mental Imagery

A detailed Summary of Mental Imagery

Mental Imagery: What is our Imagination?

Imagine that you are fishing by a lake, sitting on the soft green grass looking into the clear blue water, and drinking a cold beer. It is possible for humans to explicitly imagine and describe this situation, even down to the colors of the beer can; but there is one problem: how does the brain allow the description of tangible objects that are not in the actual perception field? Many debates within the cognitive science realm have concerned the problem of representation, namely how mental images are represented within the mind. In the following paper, mental images are identified as the visual representations in the mind when the image does not exist in the actual visual field. Two possible explanations exist for the way in which mental images are represented: they can be represented in the mind depictively as a picture or like sentences of descriptions in a syntactic language.

The Pictorialist theory of mental imagery, which has been widely argued by Stephen Kosslyn, states that mental images are similar to pictures, being somewhat spatial and the parts of the mental image corresponding to the parts of the object represented. Visual imagery involves having entities in the mind, w

Perception involves more than a visual image being reflected into the retina, the image sighted can be mentally rotated, made smaller or larger, superimpose other images on them, and the details from images can be accurately recalled from memory (from the mental image). The brain encompasses the ability to interpret previously viewed objects, where the mental images are directly related to the perception of the previously viewed object, however the brain can also originate mental images that were not perceived previously. This implies that while perception is an aid for mental imaging, it is not essential that perception occur in order to generate a mental image, but are these mental images constructed in a picture-like manner?

Subjects reported mentally rotating the stripes into the vertical orientation when imaging, and Kosslyn suggests this is done by subjects to "preclude effects due to problems in initially memorizing the stripes at the diagonal orientation." However, the initial memorization that leads to the resulting image can also be explained by analyzing the perception of the surrounding world, which is composed of countless numbers of diagonal and horizontally oriented objects, with oblique lines not being encountered as often in everyday life. Due to a lack of commonality with oblique objects, subjects would rotate the stripes to fit a pattern in which more familiarity exists, but the original perception of vertical, horizontal and oblique lines involves the same processes and interpretations. People have implicitly come to know how things generally look to them, and the experiment simulates a visual situation that parallels the imaged one, suggesting that perception is crucial to the image created in the mind.

The above experiment proves that the oblique effec

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Approximate Word count = 1210
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Science