CHAPTER 10 - Visual Imagery

Visual imagery—seeing in the absence of a visual stimulus.

Mental imagery, a broader term that refers to the ability to re-create the sensory world in the
absence of physical stimuli, is used to include all of the senses.
● People have the ability to imagine tastes, smells, and tactile experiences.
● Most people can imagine melodies of familiar songs in their head, so it is not
surprising that musicians often report strong auditory imagery and that the ability to
imagine melodies has played an important role in musical composition.

EXAMPLES:
A. 19th-century German chemist Friedrich August Kekule.
● Kekule said that the structure of benzene came to him in a dream in which he
saw a writhing chain that formed a circle that resembled a snake, with its head
swallowing its tail This visual image gave Kekule the insight that the carbon
atoms that make up the benzene molecule are arranged in a ring.
B. Albert Einstein’s description of how he developed the theory of relativity by
imagining himself traveling beside a beam of light.
C. On a more athletic level, many competitors at the Olympics use mental imagery
to visualize downhill ski runs, snowboarding moves, bobsled turns, and speed
skating races.
Imagery provides a way of thinking that adds another dimension to the verbal
techniques usually associated with thinking. But what is most important about imagery is
that it is associated not just with discoveries by famous people but also with most people’s
everyday experience.

Imagery in the History of Psychology

Early Ideas About Imagery
➔ Imageless thought debate
thinking with image VS thinking without image
(Wundt & Aristotle) (Francis Galton)
These arguments and counterarguments ended when behaviorism toppled imagery
from its central place in psychology. (John Watson: images as “unproven” and
“mythological” (1928) and therefore not worthy of study).

Imagery and the Cognitive Revolution

Cognitive psychologists developed ways to measure behavior used to infer cognitive
processes.
➔ Paired-Associate Learning
concrete nouns VS abstract nouns
Experiment: Alan Paivio’s (1963)
★ Study: participants are presented with pairs of words, like boat–hat.
★ Test: presented with the first word from each pair.
★ Task: to recall the word that was paired with it during the study period. Thus, if
they were presented with the word boat, the correct response would be hat.
 ➔ conceptual peg hypothesis Paivio (1963, 1965)
Concrete nouns create images that other words can “hang onto.
➔ mental chronometry. Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler (1971)
Determining the amount of time needed to carry out various cognitive tasks.

Experiment: Shepard and Metzler’s

★ Participant saw the pictures >>>
★ Task: to indicate, as rapidly as possible, whether the two pictures
were of the same object or of different objects.
Result:
★ The time it took to decide that two views were of the same object
was directly related to how different the angles were between the
two views
★ Participants were mentally rotating one of the views to see
whether it matched the other one.

Imagery and Perception: Do They Share the Same Mechanisms?

Perbedaan: Mental images are not as vivid or long lasting as perception.
Persamaan: Both involve spatial representation of the stimulus (the spatial experience for
both imagery and perception matches the layout of the actual stimulus).

Mental scanning–participants create mental images and then scan them in their minds. A
task in an experiment by Stephen Kosslyn.

Kosslyn’s Mental Scanning Experiments

➔ imagery debate: spatial mechanism VS propositional mechanism
Imagery and perception: both spatial
Kosslyn (1973) 1st experiment: boat experiment, reaction time = distance spatial.

⇒ Glen Lea (1975): distraction, increased reaction time.

Kosslyn (1978) 2nd experiment: imagine an island, visual imagery is spatial in nature.
Imagery and perception: not spatial, but propositional
Zenon Pylyshyn (1973) proposed another explanation: related to language rather than
perception; propositional (this started the imagery debate).

The Imagery Debate: Is Imagery Spatial or Propositional?

➔ spatial representations–representations in which different parts of an image can be
described as corresponding to specific locations in space. Kosslyn.
 ➔ epiphenomenon–something that accompanies the real mechanism but is not
actually part of the mechanism. Pylyshyn
➔ propositional representations–representations in which relationships can be
represented by abstract symbols, such as an equation, or a statement, such as “The
cat is under the table.” Pylyshyn

Propositional. The words indicate parts of the boat, the length of the lines indicate the distances
between the parts, and the words in parentheses indicate the spatial relations between the parts.

➔ depictive representations–spatial representations in which parts of the

representation correspond to parts of the object.

Debate result? Two explanations provide an excellent example of how data can be
interpreted in different ways. However, after many years of discussion and experimentation,
the weight of the evidence supports the idea that imagery is served by a spatial
mechanism and that it shares mechanisms with perception.

Comparing Imagery and Perception

additional evidence that supports the idea of spatial representation.
● Size in the Visual Field
The relationship between viewing distance and the ability to perceive details also
occurs for mental images. Participants answered questions about the rabbit (object)
more rapidly when it filled more of the visual field.
➔ mental walk task–they were to imagine that they were walking toward their
mental image of an animal.
● Interactions of Imagery and Perception
If imagery affects perception, or perception affects imagery imagery and
perception both have access to the same mechanisms.

Experiment: Cheves Perky

★ Perky asked her participants to “project” visual images of common objects
onto a screen and then to describe these images.
★ Unbeknownst to the participants, Perky was back-projecting a very dim image
of this object onto the screen.
★ Thus, when participants were asked to create an image of a banana, Perky
projected a dim image of a banana onto the screen.
 ★ Result: the participants’ descriptions of their images matched the images
that Perky was projecting. Not one of Perky’s participants noticed that there
was an actual picture on the screen.
★ Interpretation: Participants had apparently mistaken an actual picture for a
mental image.

Experiment: Martha Farah (1985)

★ Participants were asked to imagine either the letter H or the letter T on a
screen.
★ Once they had formed a clear image on the screen, they pressed a button
that caused two squares to flash, one after the other.
★ One of the squares contained a target letter, which was either an H or a T.
★ Task: to indicate whether the letter was in the first square or the second one.
★ Results: indicate that the target letter was detected more accurately when the
participant had been imagining the same letter rather than the different letter.
★ Interpretation: this result shows that perception and imagery share
mechanisms.

Imagery and the Brain

Connection between imagery and perception, but the overlap is not perfect.

Imagery Neurons in the Human Brain

Recording from Single Neurons in Humans–study how these neurons respond when the
patients carry out cognitive activities such as imaging and remembering.
Imagery neurons: respond in the same way to perceiving an object and to imagining it.
● demonstrates a possible physiological mechanism for imagery.
● supporting the idea of a close relation between perception and imagery.

Brain Imaging
➔ topographic map– specific locations on a visual stimulus cause activity at specific
locations in the visual cortex, and points next to each other on the stimulus cause
activity at locations next to each other on the cortex.
● small objects cause activity in the back of the visual cortex.
● larger objects cause activity to spread toward the front of the visual cortex.
Both imagery and perception result in topographically organized brain activation.

Overlap between brain areas activated by perceiving an object and those activated by
creating a mental image of the object.
Experiment: Giorgio Ganis and coworkers (2004)
★ Used fMRI to measure activation under two conditions, perception and imagery.
★ For the perception condition, participants observed a drawing of an object, such as
the tree.
★ For the imagery condition, participants were told to imagine a picture that they had
studied before, when they heard a tone.
★ For both the perception and imagery tasks, participants had to answer a question
such as “Is the object wider than it is tall?”
★ Result: activation at three different locations in the brain.
 ○ Perception and imagery both activate the same areas in the frontal lobe and
the same result farther back in the brain.
○ However, activation in the visual cortex in the occipital lobe at the back of
the brain, indicates that perception activates much more of this area of the
brain than does imagery.
★ This greater activity for perception isn’t surprising because the visual cortex is where
signals from the retina first reach the cortex.
★ Interpretation: There is almost complete overlap of the activation caused by
perception and imagery in the front of the brain, but some difference near the back
of the brain.

Amir Amedi and coworkers (2005): when participants were using visual imagery, the
response of some areas associated with nonvisual stimuli, such as hearing and touch, was
decreased.
★ Amedi suggests that the reason for this might be that visual images are more fragile
than real perception this deactivation helps quiet down irrelevant activity that might
interfere with the mental image.

Multivoxel Pattern Analysis

● Perception: the classifier predicted the correct picture on 63 percent of the trials
● Imagery: the classifier predicted the correct picture on 55 percent of the trials

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

● The results indicated that stimulation caused participants to respond more slowly,
and that this slowing effect occurred both for perception and for imagery.
● Based on these results, Kosslyn concluded that brain activity in the visual cortex
plays a causal role in both perception and imagery.

Neuropsychological Case Studies

Determine how brain damage affects both imagery and perception.
● Removing Part of the Visual Cortex Decreases Image Size
➔ Removing part of the visual cortex reduced the size of a person’s field of
view.
➔ The visual cortex is important for imagery.
● Problems with Perceiving Are Accompanied by Problems with Imagery
➔ Unilateral neglect: a condition caused by damage to the parietal lobes. Patient
ignores objects in one half of the visual field, even to the extent of shaving
just one side of his face or eating only the food on one side of her plate.
● Dissociations Between Imagery and Perception
Two conditions:
- perception okay, imagery neglect
- perception neglect, imagery okay
➔ visual agnosia: the inability to visually recognize objects.
Conclusions from the Imagery Debate
Imagery and perception have many features in common, but there are also differences
between them. imagery and perception are closely related and share some (but not all)
mechanisms.
Some differences:
Aspect Perception Imagery

Experience occurs automatically when needs to be generated with

we look at something. some effort.

stable—it continues as long fragile—it can vanish

as you are observing a without continued effort.
stimulus.

Manipulate images easier harder

Notes:
● People can manipulate simpler mental images.
● People who were good at imagery were able to rotate mental images of
ambiguous figures if they were provided with extra information.

Using Imagery to Improve Memory

Placing Images at Locations
➔ Method of Loci–a method in which things to be remembered are placed at different
locations in a mental image of a spatial layout.
Associating Images with Words
➔ Pegword technique–associate items with concrete words, then pair each of the
things to be remembered with a pegword by creating a vivid image of your
item-to-be-remembered together with the object represented by the word.
Advantage: possible to immediately identify an item based on its order on the list.

Individual Differences in Visual Imagery

Spatial VS Object
➔ Spatial imagery: ability to image spatial relations, such as the layout of a garden.
★ Test: Paper folding test (PFT)
➔ Object imagery: ability to image visual details, features, or objects, such as a rose
bush with bright red roses in the garden.
★ Test: Vividness of visual imagery questionnaire (VVIQ)
Other Tasks:
➔ Degraded pictures task consisted of a number of degraded line drawings.
➔ Mental rotation task required participants to judge whether pictures were two views
of the same object or mirror-image objects.
● Spatial imagers did better in the mental rotation task, and object imagers did better on
the degraded pictures task.
● Spatial ability is related to solving many types of physics problems.