Visual Imagery

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.

• Francis Galton (1883)

- 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.

• Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

- It works by detecting the changes in blood oxygenation and flow that occur
in response to neural activity – when a brain area is more active it consumes
more oxygen and to meet this increased demand blood flow increases to the
active area.

In functional MRI, brain areas “light-up” when performing certain tasks.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
• A non-invasive technique that consists of a magnetic field emanating from
a wire coil held outside the head.
• The magnetic field induces an electrical current in nearby regions of the
brain. Originally developed as a diagnostic tool for mapping brain
function. It appears promising as a treatment for some neuropsychiatric
conditions, particularly major depression.
Unilateral Neglect
• A condition caused by damage to
the parietal lobes.
• A patient who has unilateral
neglect ignores objects objects in
one-half of their visual field.
 Visual Perception

Bottom-up processing Visual Cortex

• Starts when light enters the eye
and an image is focused on the
retina, and then continues as
signals are sent along the visual
pathways to the visual cortex and
then to higher visual centers.
• Crucial for perception because it
is where objects are being
analyzed into components like
edges and orientations.
 Using Imagery to Improve Memory
• Visualizing Interacting Images
• Placing Images at locations
• Associating Images with Words
 Method of Loci
• The Method of Loci is one of the oldest mnemonic devices known to man.
It was developed by this poet called Simonides, who presented an address
at a banquet but had to split for a while – and then returned to discover the
whole place had burned down.
• Many of the bodies were severely mutilated that they can’t be identified.
But Simonides realized that he had created a mental picture of where each
person had been seated at the banquet hall.
• Simonides had invented what is now called the method of loci – a method
in which things to be remembered are placed at different locations in a
mental image of a spatial layout.
 Pegword Technique
• In the pegword mnemonic technique, you first memorize the short
rhyme. Then, using these words as pegs, you create a visual image of each
of the words you wish to remember.