Then subjects were asked questions such as, "Does the rabbit have two front paws?" In one experiment, Kosslyn (1975) asked subjects to imagine animals standing next to one another, such as a rabbit next to an elephant or a rabbit next to a fly. If subjects memorized a map, the time it took them to make a mental jump from one location to another depended upon the distance on the imagined map. Kosslyn found that the size of an imagined image influenced how quickly subjects could move around the image in memory. Steven Kosslyn of Harvard is famous for studies of mental imagery. This was a very important finding, because it implied that mental images could be manipulated as if real. Why was the Cooper and Shepard research influential?įollowing up on the first experiments with mental rotation, Cooper and Shepard (1973) found that the time required for mental rotations depended upon the amount of rotation. To determine this, most subjects must mentally rotate the figures, much as they would rotate a three-dimensional block model, to see if each matches the others. Can you find the one that is a mirror image? The fourth is different it is a mirror image of the others. Three of the shapes are the same as each other, only rotated. He used computer-generated block shapes similar to these: For example, "thinking about a telephone activates some of the same brain areas as seeing a telephone." (Posner, 1993)Įarly, important studies of mental imagery came from Roger Shepard of Stanford University and various colleagues. In general, imagining any cognitive activity seems to activate the same areas of the brain normally involved in that activity. What do brain scans show about brain areas involved in mental imagery?Īn abundance of evidence from brain scanning research shows that the same areas of the brain used for normal perception are also activated by mental imagery. You might recall from Chapter 3 that vivid imagery sometimes occurs upon awakening, in the hypnopompic state. Simply pressing lightly on closed eyelids can result in an explosion of geometric forms. When one is relaxed or half asleep, mental imagery can be quite vivid. The best way to make imagery more vivid is to imitate the conditions of sleep. For most of us, mental imagery during states of wakefulness is faint or difficult to manipulate. Some individuals are capable of deep levels of hypnosis in which they can have visual hallucinations of dreamlike clarity. That includes people who go blind at an early age after gaining some experience with vision, but not people who never see at all. What is the easiest way to make visual imagery stronger?Īlmost everybody has mental imagery during dreams. Some had detailed images, others reported none at all. 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. This is not a universal talent not everybody can conjure up mental images at will. Mental imagery can be defined as pictures in the mind or a visual representation in the absence of environmental input.
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