This is post no.2 on mental imagery. Post no. 1 is here.
Mental imagery seems like a completely subjective phenomenon. Can its existence be proven or at least can
its influences be objectively studied?
Maybe so!
Research findings on auditory
imagery
Participants were presented with the beginning of a familiar
tune (the researchers used wordless movie themes or classical music). They were asked to "play" the rest
of the tune in their mind up to a specific point in it. When they reached that point, they pushed a
button. The time lapse until the button
was pushed was proportional to the duration of the segment the participants were
asked to complete!
The time needed to say the ABC twice and to mentally say the ABC
twice is identical.
Participants were asked to say specific words and to imagine they
are saying other words. Later they could
hardly distinguish between the words they said and the words they imagined they
said.
When adults were
awakened from REM sleep, 13% of them reported having a nonverbal auditory image
in their dream, and 94% reported they talked or had conversations in their
dreams.
Research findings on visual imagery
Mental rotation is
the ability to mentally rotate representations of two and three dimensional
objects. This ability helps us recognize
objects that we see. As we saw in the
previous post, in tasks like the one in the picture below, a person is asked to
decide which of the four stimuli on the right is identical with the stimulus on
the left. People usually solve this task
by mental rotation – mentally rotating the stimuli on the right until they are
parallel (or not) with the stimulus on the left.
Shepard and Metzler
(1971), who were pioneers in this field of research, discovered that the time
needed to decide whether a rotated stimulus is identical with a given stimulus
is proportional to the degree of rotation!
This means that we rotate the object in our mind's eye in a steady pace.
Men are slightly better on this task than women. This ability is found in five months old
babies. It peaks in early adulthood and
then begins to deteriorate.
Examples of familiar tests in
which performance may be aided by mental imagery
In order to solve this matrix, we have to place in our mind's eye the middle stimulus in
every row on the left stimulus in that row.
The solution (the right stimulus in each row) is composed of the un-parallel
lines in both stimuli. Thus the answer
is no. 8. When we mentally place image
on image and analyze the result we are manipulating mental images.
Learning an association
between two concepts or a word/concept list – mental imagery
can help us learn concept pairs (for instance, if I want to learn the pair
"tree" and "cup" I can imagine a tree that grows cups
instead of fruit. The image should be
amusing and impossible to be retrieved easily).
Similar techniques help us learn word lists (for instance, we can
mentally assign words to places on a list of places on a mental fixed
path. We form visual images linking each
word to its place. When we retrieve the
words we "walk" down the mental path and "pick" the word
from each pair).
Retrieval of visual stimuli – when we draw a visual stimulus which we saw or copied in the
past, we usually form a visual image of the stimulus and "copy" it to
the paper.
Phonological segmentation – we can use mental imagery in various phonological tasks. For instance, in order to choose from the
pictures below the two that begin with the same sound, we can say the object
names in our mind's ear and analyze the first sound. This will lead us to choose "cup"
and "cane" which both begin with the sound /k/.
Mental images assist in
solving these tests, but research reveals that people who report having poor
imagery ability can solve these tests with a similar degree of success. They probably do it in different ways.
Hubbard, T. L. Auditory Imagery: Empirical Findings. Psychological
Bulletin 2010 American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. 136, No. 2,
302–329. http://timothyhubbard.net/hubPB10.pdf
SHEPARD, R. N. & METZLER, J. Mental rotation of
three-dimensional objects. Science, 1971.701-703
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