Mental Imagery - Theories and Experiments.

(In no particular order. A listing here does not necessarily imply any endorsement of the views expressed at the destination sites. - N.J.T.T.)

• Definitions or brief discussions of "mental imagery" from the numerous reference books available at xrefer.com.

• Image - from the "great" 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. [Note: You will need to scroll down the page to find the beginning of the relevant entry.]
  The contemporary version of Encyclopedia Britannica now requires a subscription to access articles, but the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, acknowledged by the cognoscenti as the best ever Britannica (even, perhaps, the best ever encyclopedia!) is now available free online. Unfortunately the content pages have been created from scans, which gives rise to some errors and formatting problems, and navigation can be awkward, because articles frequently begin part way down a (web) page and may cut off before the end without a forward link to the next page, where the article continues.

• Student pages from Elizabeth Johnston's "Investigating Minds" course at Sarah Lawrence College.

  Eidetic Imagery.

  Visual Thinking.

  Mnemonics.

• Some notes on The Philosophy of Cognitive Science by Jesse Prinz.

  Mental Imagery 1: Descriptionism.

  Mental Imagery 2: Pictorialism.

  Mental Imagery 3: A Compromise?

• From 1904: A controversy (in a series of short articles) from the age of introspectionist psychology about the existence of "organic images" (i.e. imagery of bodily sensations, touch, taste, smell, and the kinaesthetic sense ).

  1. Organic Images, by E.B. Titchener.
  2. Organic Images, by W. Lay.
  3. Image or sensation? by Willard C. Gore.
  4. Image or Sensation, by George Herbert Mead.
  	[You may find it helpful to read the "Editor's Note" on this page first. - N.J.T.T.]

• "The Relationship Between Visual Perception and Visual Mental Imagery: A Reappraisal of the Neuropsychological Evidence." From the journal Cortex, a 2002 review article by neuroscientist Paolo Bartolomeo. Argues that the Perceptual Activity theory of imagery best fits the full range of neurological evidence. [PDF file]

• "Eye Scanpaths During Visual Imagery Reenact Those of Perception of the Same Visual Scene." By Bruno Laeng & Dinu-Stefan Teodorescu. Published in the journal Cognitive Science. A direct demonstration of the involvement of exploratory perceptual activity in imagery. [PDF file]

• "The Picture theory of Reason." Hungarian philosopher J.C. Nyíri defends imagery theories of thought and meaning in the light of their history and their 20th century eclipse at the hands of Wittgenstein and his successors. (Slow to load, especially the graphics, but worth it.)

• Articles on "Philosophy of Psychology, Imagery, & Mental Representation - by Dr. Peter Slezak, Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Cognitive Science and Senior Lecturer in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales. After Pylyshyn, Slezak is perhaps the leading supporter of the description theory of imagery, and one of the most incisive critics of picture theory. [Slezak's imagery page may not load properly in Internet Explorer™. I have alerted him to the problem and he may have fixed it by the time you read this, but if not, try Mozilla or Opera or some other superior browser.]

• "Time resolved fMRI of Mental Rotation." Published article by Richter et al. (1997) showing involvement of brain motor (as opposed to visual) areas in mental rotation tasks.

• "Motor Area Activation During Mental Rotation Studied by Time-Resolved Single Trial fMRI." Another published article by Richter et al. (2000) showing brain motor area involvement in mental rotation tasks.

• "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery." Published article by Eric Schwitzgebel, arguing that we do not have a very clear knowledge of our own conscious imagery experience.

• Statistics of Mental Imagery. Francis Galton's classic 1880 paper that inaugurated the study of individual differences in imagery vividness; said to be the first ever psychological questionnaire. Precursor of the VVIQ.

• The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ). David Marks' VVIQ, made available here, is probably the best studied measure of individual differences in the subjective experience of imagery.

• The Imagery Questionnaire: An Investigation of its Validity. A study critical of the validity of the VVIQ. By Paul J. Chara Jr. (Oral Roberts University) & William S. Verplanck (University of Tennessee).

• "Perceptual Symbol Systems." A 1999 Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article by distinguished cognitive psychologist Lawrence Barsalou. Argues that mental representation in general (whether or not experienced as conscious imagery) is perceptual in character.

• Photographic memory - eidetic hoax. A discussion (initiated by me) about the validity of a famous experiment on eidetic imagery. "Elizabeth", who could supposedly fuse a random dot stereogram via eidetic imagery, and thus see the resultant 3-D figure, was probably a hoaxer. From the message board of the Cecil Adams' The Straight Dope column.

• Images in Practice - Visualization. A collection of definitions and quotations.

• A Model of Mental Image Generation and Manipulation. Brief abstract of Bryant A. Julstrom's doctoral thesis describing a connectionist computer simulation of imagery (essentially a version of pictorialism).

• Sketching As Mental Imagery Processing. A series of PowerPoint™ slides from a seminar by Manolya Kavakli & J.S. Gero of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney.

• The Imagery Debate. A brief entry, by C.P. Watling, from The University of Alberta's Cognitive Science Dictionary. As usual, the "imagry debate" refered to here, is the so-called analog-propositional debate that originated, and was at its most heated, during the 1970s. Of course, there are many other things about imagery that can be and have been debated. For my very different take on the analog-propositional debate, and for my assessment of its significance for us today, click here.

• The Problem of Mental Images. From "More than Meets the Eye: Aristotle on Sense Perception," by Thomas A. Fowler (student paper from Tufts University).

• American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery. Focused mainly on clinical applications and personality issues. Publishes the journal Imagination, Cognition, and Personality.

• International Imagery Association. Association. Seems now to exist mainly to promote the thought of founder Dr. Akhter Ahsen. Publishes the Journal of Mental Imagery (edited by Ahsen).

• Imagination Can Enhance Visual Perception. News report of an experiment.

• Mental Imagery. Lecture handout from Brazil (in English).

• Mental Imagery. Course notes from Dr. Sandra Willis of California State University, Fullerton.

• Mental Imagery. Cognitive Psychology crib notes.

• "A laboratory-based experimental methodology is inappropriate for the study of mental imagery." Abstract of 1985 Journal of Mental Imagery article by John C. Yuille.

• "The role of imagery in memory: On shared and distinctive information." Abstract of 1987 Psychological Bulletin article by Marschark, Richman, Yuille, & Hunt.

• "Spatial Representation and Haptic Mental Rotation." Abstract of a paper by Christer Garbis, graduate student at Linköping University, Sweden. (Full version available as PostScript file.)

• "Motor processes in mental rotation." By Mark Wexler, Stephen M. Kosslyn & Alain Berthoz (from the CogPrints archive). [Published in 1998 in Cognition (68) 77-94.]

• Mental Rotation Experiment Software. By Richard Abrams of Washington University, St. Louis. Available for download.

• "A New Spin on Mental Rotation." An attempt at a computer simulation of the phenomenon, by Peter Yule.

• Imagery and Self-Awareness: A Theoretical Note. By Alain Morin, Ph.D. From the ejournal Theory and Review in Psychology.

• "Imageries and Concepts." By seminal Polish philosopher Kazimerz Twardowsky (1866-1938). Courtesy of Axiomathes.

• The Laboratory of the leading imagery researcher Stephen Kosslyn.

• Zenon Pylyshyn's Home page. Pylyshyn has long been the leading critic of "pictorial" theories of imagery (such as Kosslyn's), and important new material is now to be found here. See also these notes for his Cognitive Science Seminar on Mental Imagery.
  • "Mental Imagery: In Search of a Theory." Pylyshyn's latest (2002) and greatest critique of the picture theory of imagery. Published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2002 - vol.25) 157-237. My published commentary on on this is The False Dichotomy of Imagery.
  • "Stalking the Elusive Mental Image Screen." Pylyshyn's reply to the commentators on the above article. Well worth reading even if you have not read the commentaries themselves. From Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2002 - vol. 25) 216-237.
  • "Return of the Mental Image: Are There Really Pictures in the Head?" Essentially a more concise restatement or abstract of the argument of the two articles above. Published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2003 - vol. 7) 113-118. [PDF file]
    

• "The Representing Brain: Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery", by Marc Jeannerod. This article was published in the prestigious journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Jeannerod is a distinguished French neuroscientist.

• "Consciousness After Postmodernism," by Ralph Ellis. This is not so much about postmodernism as about a view of consciousness that gives a central place to imagery and perceptual activity. See also my review of Ellis' book Questioning Consciousness.

• Eye movement and visualisation links. From Swedish Cognitive Scientist Kenneth Holmqvist.

• Språk och Visualisering, by Kenneth Holmqvist (in Swedish).

• "Mental Images", by Clive Leddy. Seems to be an essay by a Cognitive Science (graduate?) student in Sweden.

• Imagery --- Creativity --- Paivio's 'Dual Coding' (i.e. imaginal and verbal) theory of memory. From Greg Kearsley's TIP (Theory Into Practice) database: "a tool intended to make learning and instructional theory more accessible to educators". This consists mainly of succinct introductory essays and brief bibliographies on theories, concepts, and (pedagogical) applications of behaviorist and cognitive psychology.

• Philosophical writings on mental imagery (and other topics) by Tony Birch.

• Connecting Visual and Verbal Space: An Interdisciplinary Study on the Foundation and Use of Mental Images in a Listener Model. Doctoral thesis by German Artificial Intelligence researcher Jörg R.J. Schirra.

• "The Depictive Nature of Visual Mental Imagery." A paper by Taiwanese Philosopher Norman Y. Teng. (Presented at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, August 10-16, 1998, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.) Essentially a critique of Tye's view of imagery.

• Janice L. Flake's Mental Imagery Links Page.

• Sound-Induced Mental Imagery for the Blind, by Peter Meijer. Meijer is a Dutch engineer who has invented a device, the vOICe, that encodes a visual scene as sound, and that he hopes will be useful to blind people. His impressive site (lots of sound, Java etc.) includes online demonstrations of his technology, as well as this page on imagery. [mirror site]

• A Bibliography of 'Visual mental imagery (the "mind's eye"), especially as it applies to inference.' Compiled in 1994. From Paul Thagard's "Computational Epistemology" site.

• Bibliographies on Mental Imagery in Cognitive Science, and Consciousness and Imagery. From Dave Chalmers' Bibliography of the Philosophy of Mind - more extensive imagery bibliographies may be found in my stuff, listed above, especially my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Mental Imagery, but Chalmers and Thagard both do include things I omit - N.J.T.T.

• "Exorcizing the Ghost of Mental Imagery," by Stevan Harnad, professor of Psychology, University of Southampton, U.K., and editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

• Research on Recognition and Spatial Processing in Perception and Imagery by Dr. Itiel E. Dror of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, U.K.

• "Imagery: A Meandering Review Of The Literature," by James Sempsey. Mainly with an eye to the pedagogical relevance of mental imagery - personal, subjective and discursive.

• "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it," by John B. Watson. The classic 1913 paper instigating Behaviorist psychology, and denying the existence of imagery. (See especially footnote 7, but also see this.)

• Abstracts from the Tucson Toward a Science of Consciousness Conferences:
  • Imagery at Tucson II (1996) - also this.
  • Imagery at Tucson III (1998): see abstracts 1081, 1275, 1079, 1081, & 1165.
  • Imagery at Tucson 2000 (2000) - also these: 131, 160, 161, 164, 414.

Return to Home Page:
Imagination, Mental Imagery, Consciousness, Cognition:
Science, Philosophy & History.