Tata Institute of Social Sciences - Imagery, Retrospect and Prospect

Imagery, Retrospect and Prospect

Sanghamitra Raiguru

H2014ED21

MA Education - III

Tata Institute of Social Sciences

What is imagery? Let’s look for the answer through a day to day life experience: The researcher was asked to count and tell how many rooms are there on the second floor of her institute (one door = one room, at TISS Hyderabad)? What will she do now? She had never counted the rooms before, and now she is not in her institute. She closed her eyes and started counting the doors. Seventeen she answered. What was it that she just did? There must have been some kind of mental representation, and she operated on it, to get the answer. There is something in our mind which we can work on, operate on. And the mental operation takes place on a representation of the object or sight in the mind. According to John T.E. Richardson “a mental representation in which information about the appearance of physical objects, events and scenes can be depicted and manipulated” (Vecchi & Bottini, 2006, p.3) is called as mental imagery. In literal or colloquial term it is called as visualizing; seeing in the mind's eye; hearing in the head; or imagining the feel of, and so forth. Imagery is mostly referred to as a visio-sensory representation and hence the most common form of imagery is visual imagery. However, other sensory representation like feel, smell, sound and flavour also contribute to imagery. The experiencing of imagery by any of the sensory input is called as ‘imagining’ (Thomas, 2014).

The definition and origin of the term ‘imagery’, a noun, per Oxford dictionary is: “visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work; visual symbolism; and visual images collectively” (oxforddictionaries.com). Imagery originated in the Old French language, where it came from the word imager meaning image (oxforddictionaries.com). In cognitive science meaning of imagery is not just limited to the visual symbolism or just the figurative language. Imagery here is a rather vast area of research, where the use is from therapeutic to computational. However mental imagery is experienced as one of or all of the following three forms: 1. a quasi-perceptual conscious experience per se; 2. hypothetical picture-like representations in the mind and/or brain that give rise to quasi-perceptual conscious experience; or 3. Hypothetical inner representations of any sort which give rise to a quasi-perceptual conscious experience (Thomas, 2014). However, all these forms are referring to a representation arising from a sensory experience, this is contested. Some imagery are constructed without any corresponding sensory input. Imagery is personal and subjective in nature (Vecchi & Bottini, 2006). In children of upto three years of age imagery is purely subjective in nature.

History of Imagery

 Imagery as a mental process had its presence felt even 2500 (Paivio, 2006). According to Aristotle without imagery thought is not possible, hence imagery is an essential and central phenomena in mental process. He used a Greek term ‘phantasma’ which translates as ‘mental image’ in English to describe imagery. According to him phantasma is similar to printing or wax impression, and can also be a residual form of the actual sense impression. Phantasma can even be called as a movement which is being created because of the power of senses (Thomas, 2014). In the year 1880, Galton developed questionnaire to collect data from respondents about their mental imagery, pertaining to some familiar objects or scenes, like their breakfast table. Here he also questioned them about the other forms of sensory perception that evoked imagery, like that of music, or smell. This was the first time when an attempt to know about non-visual imagery was made (Vecchi & Bottini, 2006, p.3). Stephen Kosslyn in his book ‘Image and Mind the Resolution of Imagery Debate’ writes an account of the disappearance of imagery from the theories of mental events in the early twentieth century. He writes that due to rise of behaviourism, the perception of science changed. Scientific methods only took into considerations those phenomena that are observable. Mental processes unlike the other unobservable scientific theory of electron, could not even be tested on the tracks or spoor left behind. Hence Imagery was not considered as a proper subject matter of scientific psychology, from 1913 to 1960 (Kosslyn, 1996).

The human processing system of imagery

According to Kosslyn there are atlest four type of processing system in a human brain that helps the process of imagery, they are: 1. Image generation. 2. Image inspection. 3. Image maintenance. 4. Image transformation.

Image generation: can happen only in two conditions first when one can retain the perceptual input online that is in the working memory, then an image can be formed of it. And second when the image is stored into long term memory and can be retrieved to have an mental image of it. Kosslyn suggests that there can be various various mechanism involved in this process. Some mechanism are very similar to that of perception, even function with the same parts of the brain if it has equal-modality. In short, images can be formed by activating visual memories of global patterns, by activating visual memories of individual parts and then arranging them, or by selectively allocating attention (Kosslyn, 2011, p.270).

Image Inspection: Imagery due to its similarity with perception shades the other mental process like navigation, recognition, and tracking. So Kosslyn is of the view that objects are inspected in imagery as they are in perception.  And when a representation is formed in the mind, then both the sensory and the memory based representation are treated alike Kosslyn, 2011).

Image maintenance: Because of the characteristic of imagery being similar to that of perception, the notion that image fade quickly and hence require maintenance.

Image Transformation: According to Shepard and Cooper the process of imagery is to mimic real situations and predict what would happen in the similar situation. For this it needs to rotate and transform the image like doing in real time. It has been observed that while doing transformation tasks the motor areas of the brain get activated. Researchers have also found that persons with damaged right hemisphere of the brain have difficulty performing the mental rotation tasks.

The purpose of imagery as a cognitive process