A mental image is an experience that significantly resembles the experience of perceiving some object, event, or scene, but that occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses (McKellar, 1957; Richardson,1969; Finke, 1989; Thomas, 2003). The nature of these experiences, what makes them possible, and their function (if any) have long been subjects of research and controversy in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and, more recently, neuroscience. As contemporary researchers use the expression, mental images (or mental imagery) can occur in any sense mode, so that we may experience auditory images (Reisberg, 1992), olfactory images (Bensafi et al., 2003), and so forth. However, the vast majority of philosophical and scientific investigations of the topic focus upon visual mental imagery. It is widely assumed that, like humans, many types of animal are capable of experiencing mental images. However, owing to the fundamentally subjective nature of the phenomenon, evidence either for or against this assumption is lacking. For other uses, see Philosophy (disambiguation). ... Psychology (from Greek: Literally knowledge of the soul (mind)) is both an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. ... Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. ... Drawing of the cells in the chicken cerebellum by S. Ramón y Cajal Neuroscience is a field that is devoted to the scientific study of the nervous system. ...

Philosophers such as Berkeley, and Hume, and early experimental psychologists, such as Wundt and James, understood ideas in general to be mental images, and today it is very widely believed that images function as mental representations, playing an important role in memory and thinking (Paivio, 1986; Egan, 1992; Barsalou, 1999; Prinz, 2002). Indeed, some have gone so far as to suggest that images are best understood as by definition a form of inner, mental or neural representation (Block, 1983; Kosslyn, 1983). Others, however, reject the view that the image experience may be identical with (or directly caused by) any such representation in the mind or the brain (Sartre, 1940; Ryle, 1949; Skinner, 1974; Thomas, 1999; Bartolomeo, 2002; Bennett & Hacker, 2003). George Berkeley (IPA: , Bark-Lee) (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley, was an influential Irish philosopher whose primary philosophical achievement is the advancement of a theory he called immaterialism (later referred to as subjective idealism by others). ... This article is about the philosopher. ... Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (August 16, 1832-August 31, 1920) was a German psychologist, physiologist, and professor who is, along with William James, regarded as the father of psychology. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... IDEA may refer to: Electronic Directory of the European Institutions IDEA League Improvement and Development Agency Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Indian Distance Education Association Integrated Data Environments Australia Intelligent Database Environment for Advanced Applications IntelliJ IDEA - a Java IDE Interactive Database for Energy-efficient Architecture International IDEA (International Institute... A mental model is an explanation in someones thought process for how something works in the real world. ... Allan Paivio is an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. ... Kieran Egan, (born 1942) has written on issues in education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and the intellectual stages (Egan calls them understandings) that mark different ages from birth to adulthood. ... Lawrence W. Barsalou, born on November 3, 1951 in San Diego (California/USA), is a psychologist and a cognitive scientist. ... Ned Block (born 1942) is a philosopher of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science. ... Stephen Michael Kosslyn (born in 1948) is an American psychologist. ... Jean Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905–April 15, 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic. ... Gilbert Ryle (born August 19, 1900 in Brighton, died October 6, 1976 in Oxford), was a philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers influenced by Wittgensteins insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the... Burrhus Frederic Fred Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990), Ph. ...

How mental images form in the brain

Have you ever wondered why you seem to get a mental picture of something happening when you are reading a book? Or maybe when you have a daydream? These images appear like pictures in your mind. For example, when a musician hears a song they can sometimes "see" the song notes in their head. This is considered different from an after-effect, such as an after-image. Calling up an image in our minds can be a voluntary act, so it can be characterized as being under various degrees of conscious control.

According to some biologists^{[citation needed]} our experiences of the world is stored as mental images. These mental images can then be associates and compares with other mental images, and can be used to synthesize completely new images. Some believe that this process allows us to form useful theories of how the world works based on likely sequences of mental images, without having to directly experience that outcome, for example through the processes of deduction or simulation. Whether other creatures have this capability is debated. Look up deduction in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Animal cognition, or cognitive ethology, is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of animals. ...

Philosophical ideas about mental images

Mental images are an important topic in classical and modern philosophy, as they are central to the study of knowledge. In the Republic book VII Plato uses the metaphor of a prisoner in a cave, bound and unable to move, sitting with his back to a fire and watching the shadows cast on the wall in front of him by people carrying objects behind his back. The objects that they are carrying are representations of real things in the world. The prisoner, explains Socrates, is like a human being making mental images from the sense data that he experiences. This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... The Republic (Greek: ) is an influential work of philosophy and political theory by the Greek philosopher Plato, written in approximately 360 BC. It is written in the format of a Socratic dialogue. ... This article is about metaphor in literature and rhetoric. ... This page is about the Classical Greek philosopher. ...

More recently, Bishop Berkeley's proposed similar ideas in his theory of idealism. Berkeley stated that reality is equivalent to mental images — our mental images are not a copy of another material reality, but that reality itself. Berkeley, however, sharply distinguished between the images that he considered to constitute the external world, and the images of individual imagination. According to Berkeley, only the latter are considered "mental imagery" in the contemporary sense of the term. George Berkeley (IPA: , Bark-Lee) (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley, was an influential Irish philosopher whose primary philosophical achievement is the advancement of a theory he called immaterialism (later referred to as subjective idealism by others). ... This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedias quality standards. ...

The eighteenth century British writer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, criticized idealism. When asked what he thought about idealism (while out on a walk in Scotland) he is alleged to have replied "I refute it thus!" as he kicked a large rock and his leg rebounded. His point was that the idea that the rock was just another mental image and had no material existence of its own, was a poor explanation of the painful sense data he had just experienced. For other persons named Samuel Johnson, see Samuel Johnson (disambiguation). ... This article is about the country. ...

David Deutsch addresses Johnson's objection to idealism in The Fabric of Reality^{[citation needed]} when he states that if we judge the value of our mental images of the world by the quality and quantity of the sense data that they can explain, then the most valuable mental image — or theory — that we currently have is that the world has a real independent existence and that humans have successfully evolved by building up and adapting patterns of mental images to explain it. This is an important idea in scientific thought. Philosophy of science is the study of assumptions, foundations, and implications of science, especially in the natural sciences and social sciences. ...

Critics of scientific realism ask^{[citation needed]} how the inner perception of mental images actually occurs. This is sometimes called the "homunculus problem" (see also the mind's eye). The problem is similar to asking how the images you see on a computer screen exist in the memory of the computer. To scientific materialism, mental images and the perception of them must be brain-states. According to these philosophers, scientific realists cannot explain where the images and the perceiver of them exist in the brain or its functions. To use the analogy of the computer screen, these critics argue that cognitive science and psychology has been unsuccessful in identifying the component in the brain (e.g. 'hardware' such as a computer graphics card) or the mental processes that store these images (e.g. 'software' such as a graphics device driver). Scientific realism is a view in the philosophy of science about the nature of scientific success, an answer to the question what does the success of science involve? The debate over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities (objects, process and events) apparently... The concept of a homunculus (Latin for little man, sometimes spelled homonculus, plural homunculi) is often used to illustrate the functioning of a system. ... The phrase minds eye refers to the human ability for visual perception, imagination, visualization, and memory, or, in other words, ones ability to see things with the mind. ... In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions; that matter is the only substance. ... Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. ... Psychology (from Greek: Literally knowledge of the soul (mind)) is both an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. ... Windows XP loading drivers during a Safe Mode bootup A device driver, or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a computer hardware device. ...

Mental Imagery in Experimental Psychology

Cognitive psychologists and (later) cognitive neuroscientists have empirically tested some of the philosophical questions related to whether and how the human brain uses mental imagery in cognition. Cognitive Psychology is the school of psychology that examines internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language. ... The field of cognitive neuroscience concerns the scientific study of the neural mechanisms underlying cognition and is a branch of neuroscience. ...

One related theory of the mind that was examined in these experiments was the "brain as serial computer" philosophical metaphor of the 70s. Psychologist Zenon Pylyshyn theorized that the human mind processes mental images by decomposing them into an underlying mathematical proposition. Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler (1971) challenged that view by presenting subjects with 2D line drawings of groups of 3D block "objects" and asking them to determine whether that "object" was the same as a second figure, some of which were rotations of the first "object". Shepard and Metzler proposed that if we decomposed and then mentally re-imaged the objects into basic mathematical propositions, as the then-dominant view of cognition "as a serial digital computer" (Gardner 1987) assumed, then it would be expected that the time it took to determine whether the object was the same or not would be independent of how much the object was rotated. Shepard and Metzler found the opposite; a linear relationship between the degree of rotation in the mental imagery task and the time it took participants to reach their answer. Zenon Pylyshyn (born 1937) is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. ... Roger N. Shepard cognitive scientist and aurthor of Toward a Univeral Law of Greneralization for Psychological Science. ...

This mental rotation finding implied that the human mind — and the human brain — maintains and manipulates mental images as topographic and topological wholes, an implication that was quickly put to test by psychologists. Kosslyn and colleagues (1995; see also 1994) showed in a series of neuroimaging experiments that the mental image of objects like the letter "F" are mapped, maintained and rotated as an image-like whole in areas of the human visual cortex. Moreover, Kosslyn's work showed that there were considerable similarities between the neural mappings for imagined stimuli and perceived stimuli. The authors of these studies concluded that while the neural processes they studied rely on mathematical and computational underpinnings, the brain also seems optimized to handle the sort of mathematics that constantly computes a series of topologically-based images rather than calculating a mathematical model of an object. Mental rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of two dimensional and three dimensional objects. ...

Recent studies in neurology and neuropsychology on mental imagery have further questioned the "mind as serial computer" theory, arguing instead that human mental imagery is both visually and motorically embodied. For example, several studies provided evidence that people are slower at rotating line drawings of objects such as hands in directions incompatible with the joints of the human body (Parsons 1987; 2003), and that patients with painful injured arms are slower at mentally rotating line drawings of the hand from the side of the injured arm (Schwoebel et al. 2001).

Some psychologists, including Stephen Kosslyn, have argued that such results occur because of interference in the brain between distinct systems in the brain that process the visual and motoric mental imagery. Subsequent neuroimaging studies (Kosslyn et al. 2001) showed that the interference between the motoric and visual imagery system could be induced by having participants physically handle actual 3D blocks glued together to form objects similar to those depicted in the line-drawings. However, Amorim et al. (2006) have recently showed that when a cylindrical "head" was added to Shepard and Metzler's line drawings of 3D block figures, participants were quicker and more accurate at solving mental rotation problems. They argue that motoric embodiment is not just "interference" that inhibits visual mental imagery, but is capable of facilitating mental imagery. Stephen Michael Kosslyn (born in 1948) is an American psychologist. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with functional neuroimaging. ...

These and numerous related studies have led to a relative consensus within cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy on the neural status of mental images. Researchers generally agree that while there is no homunculus inside the head viewing these mental images, our brains do form and maintain mental images as image-like wholes (Rohrer 2006). The problem of exactly how these images are stored and manipulated within the human brain, particularly within language and communication, remains a fertile area of study. Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. ...

One of the longest running research topics on the mental image has been the fact that people report large individual differences in the vividness of their images. Special questionnaires have been developed to assess such differences, including the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) developed by David Marks. Labaoratory studies have suggested that the subjectively reported variations in imagery vividness are associated with different neural states within the brain and also different cognitive competences such as the ability to accurately recall information presented in pictures (Marks, 1973). Rodway, Gillies and Schepman (2006) used a novel long-term change detection task to determine whether participants with low and high vividness scores on the VVIQ2 showed any performance differences. Rodway et al. (2006) found that high vividness participants were significantly more accurate at detecting salient changes to pictures compared to low vividness participants. This replicated an earlier study by Gur and Hilgard (1975). The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) was published in 1973 by the British psychologist David Marks (Marks, 1973). ... David Marks is a psychologist and professor at City University in London, U.K.. He is founding editor of the Journal of Health Psychology. ...

Recent studies have found that individual differences in VVIQ scores can be used to predict changes in a person's brain while visualizing different activities. Cui et al. (2007) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the association between early visual cortex activity relative to the whole brain while participants visualised themselves or another person bench pressing or stair climbing. Reported image vividness correlates significantly with the relative fMRI signal in the visual cortex. Thus individual differences in the vividness of vidual imagery can be measured objectively.

Training and Learning Styles

Some educational theorists have drawn from the idea of mental imagery in their studies of learning styles. Proponents of these theories state that people often have learning processes which emphasize visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems of experience^{[citation needed]}. According to these theorists, teaching in multiple overlapping sensory systems benefits learning and they encourage teachers to use content and media that integrates well with the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems whenever possible. Examples of these teaching methods include spoken components with a whiteboard or overheads. In education and psychology, learning theories help us understand the process of learning. ... It is commonly believed that most people favor some particular method of interacting with, taking in, and processing stimuli or information. ...

Educational researchers have examined whether the experience of mental imagery affects the degree of learning. For example, imagining playing a 5-finger piano exercise (mental practice) resulted in a significant improvement in performance over no mental practice — though not as significant as that produced by physical practice and the authors of the study stated that "mental practice alone seems to be sufficient to promote the modulation of neural circuits involved in the early stages of motor skill learning." (Pascual-Leone et al 1995).

Psychiatric ideas about mental images

Mental images, and particular images from dreams, are the basis for the theories of Sigmund Freud about human behavior. His basic thesis was that our childhood experiences strongly influence the mental images that we make in later life. He believed that humans form mental images in the unconscious according to their "latent" desires and they are not aware of them in their conscious mind although, according to Freud, they have a major influence on human behavior. Sigmund Freud (IPA: ), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939), was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. ... This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

See also

• Imagination
• Mental rotation
• Cognition
• Animal cognition

Imagination is accepted as the innate ability and process to invent partial or complete personal realms within the mind from elements derived from sense perceptions of the shared world. ... Mental rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of two dimensional and three dimensional objects. ... Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Animal cognition, or cognitive ethology, is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of animals. ...

References

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• Barsalou, L.W. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577-660.

• Bartolomeo, P. (2002). The Relationship Between Visual perception and Visual Mental Imagery: A Reappraisal of the Neuropsychological Evidence. Cortex 38: 357-378. Cortex open access archive

• Bennett, M.R. & Hacker, P.M.S. (2003). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell.

• Bensafi, M., Porter, J., Pouliot, S., Mainland, J., Johnson, B., Zelano, C., Young, N., Bremner, E., Aframian, D., Kahn, R., & Sobel, N. (2003). Olfactomotor Activity During Imagery Mimics that During Perception. Nature Neuroscience 6: 1142-1144.

• Block, N. (1983). Mental Pictures and Cognitive Science. Philosophical Review 92: 499-539.

• Cui, X., Jeter, C.B., Yang, D., Montague, P.R.,& Eagleman, D.M. (2007). "Vividness of mental imagery: Individual variability can be measured objectively". Vision Research, 47, 474-478.

• Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality. ISBN 0-14-014690-3. 

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Kieran Egan, (born 1942) has written on issues in education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and the intellectual stages (Egan calls them understandings) that mark different ages from birth to adulthood. ...

External links

• Imagination, Mental Imagery, Consciousness, and Cognition: Scientific, Philosophical and Historical Approaches.

• Roadmind University The Roerich Psychodynamic Inventory (RPI) provides statisical data to determine the validity of mental imagery for cognition of the minds raw emotional state. (Dr. Robert Roerich MD.)

• Mental Imagery in Mathematics