A Framework and Open Questions on Imagination in Adults and Children (original) (raw)
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Unconscious Imagination and the Mental Imagery Debate.
Frontiers in Psychology , 2017
Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains. The current evidence, however, is inconclusive: while evidence from transcranial brain stimulation seem to support this conclusion, neurophysiological evidence from brain lesion studies (e.g., from patients with brain lesions resulting in a loss of mental imagery but not a corresponding loss of perception and vice versa) indicates that there are functional and anatomical dissociations between mental imagery and perception. Assuming that the mental imagery and perception do not overlap, at least, to the extent traditionally assumed, then the question arises as to what exactly mental imagery is and whether it parallels perception by proceeding via several functionally distinct mechanisms. In this review, we argue that even though there may not be a shared mechanism underlying vision for perception and conscious imagery, there is an overlap between the mechanisms underlying vision for action and unconscious visual imagery. On the basis of these findings, we propose a modification of Kosslyn’s model of imagery that accommodates unconscious imagination and explore possible explanations of the quasi-pictorial phenomenology of conscious visual imagery in light of the fact that its underlying neural substrates and mechanisms typically are distinct from those of visual experience.
Untying the Knot: Imagination, Perception and their Neural Substrates
Synthese, 2021
How tight is the conceptual connection between imagination and perception? A number of philosophers, from the early moderns to present-day predictive processing theorists, tie the knot as tightly as they can, claiming that states of the imagination, i.e. mental imagery, are a proper subset of perceptual experience. This paper labels such a view 'perceptualism' about the imagination and supplies new arguments against it. The arguments are based on high-level perceptual content and, distinctly, cognitive penetration. The paper also defuses a recent, influential argument for perceptualism based on the 'discovery' that visual perception and mental imagery share a significant neural substrate: circuitry in V1, the brain's primary visual cortex. Current neuropsychology is shown to be equivocal at best on this matter. While experiments conducted on healthy, neurotypical subjects indicate substantial neural overlap, there is extensive clinical evidence of dissociations between imagery and perception in the brain, most notably in the case of aphantasia.
There is Something about the Image: A Defence of the Two‐Component View of Imagination
dialectica
According to the two‐component view of sensory imagination, imaginative states combine qualitative and assigned content. Qualitative content is the imagistic component of the imaginative state and is provided by a quasi‐perceptual image; assigned content has a language‐like structure. Recently, such a two‐component view has been criticized by Daniel Hutto and Nicholas Wiltsher, both of whom have argued that postulating two contents is unnecessary for explaining how imagination represents. In this paper, I will defend the two‐component theory by arguing that it has three explanatory advantages over its competitors. First, it makes explicit a widely acknowledged distinction between engaged imagination and mere supposition. Second, it explains how imagination is constrained by objects’ perceptual appearances. Third, it explains how imaginings can be exploratory.
Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique, 2019
Some argue that photographic and cinematic images are “transparent”; we see objects “through” photographs as we see objects in mirrors, through telescopes, etc. However, it has also been suggested that seeing photographic images does not provide us with the kind of egocentric information seeing proper does, so photographs cannot be considered transparent. There is also a disagreement about the kind of imagining cinematic images induce. Some think that watching fiction films involves imagining seeing the depicted events from the point of view of the camera, while others hold that such a process would involve imagining the complicated, and at times impossible ways of gaining the kind of epistemic access suggested by the shots. In my paper I argue that the controversy concerning transparency and imagining seeing is misguided, for the differences between these positions become mainly terminological, once the nature of the cognitive architecture, the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms a...
Cognition, 2021
Visual experiences can be triggered externally, by signals coming from the outside world during perception; or internally, by signals from memory during mental imagery. Imagery and perception activate similar neural codes in sensory areas, suggesting that they might sometimes be confused. In the current study, we investigated whether imagery influences perception by instructing participants to imagine gratings while externally detecting these same gratings at threshold. In a series of three experiments, we showed that imagery led to a more liberal criterion for reporting stimulus presence, and that this effect was both independent of expectation and stimulusspecific. Furthermore, participants with more vivid imagery were generally more likely to report the presence of external stimuli, independent of condition. The results can be explained as either a low-level sensory or a highlevel decision-making effect. We discuss that the most likely explanation is that during imagery, internally generated sensory signals are sometimes confused for perception and suggest how the underlying mechanisms can be further characterized in future research. Our findings show that imagery and perception interact and emphasize that internally and externally generated signals are combined in complex ways to determine conscious perception.
The role of visual experience in mental imagery
2005
The mental imagery of participants who became blind early in life (EB participants), participants who became blind later in life (LB participants), and sighted participants was compared in two experiments. In the first experiment, the participants were asked to image common objects and to estimate how far away these objects appeared in their image. In the second experiment, the participants were asked to point to the left and right sides of three objects, imaged at three increasing distances. The LB participants' performance of the tasks in both experiments was similar to that of the sighted participants, whereas the performance of the EB participants differed. The results reflect the close relationship between the development of visual perception and the properties of images. The authors are indebted to Professor Claude Veraart for his helpful comments and thank the volunteers and the OEuvre Nationale des Aveugles for their essential collaboration in this study. This research was supported by Grant 3.4547.00 from the Belgian Foundation for Medical Scientific Research. Visual mental imagery plays an important role in daily life and in solving many problems. It is involved in several cognitive activities like memory, spatial reasoning, the acquisition of skills, and the comprehension of language (for a review, see Kosslyn, Behrmann, & Jeannerod, 1995). A close relationship between visual perception and imagery has
Perception & Psychophysics, 2000
A series of experiments considers the extent to which the interrelations among subjective magnitudes aroused by images corresponds to those for subjective magnitudes aroused by physical stimuli. In Experiment 1,68 undergraduates typed phrases in response to graded categories regarding the imagined magnitude of lights, sounds, and smells. In Experiment 2, 5 undergraduates and, in Experiment 3, 3 graduate students then magnitude estimated the image intensity aroused by each of these stimulus phrases. In Experiments 4 and 5, the same subjects performed cross-modality matches between phrases arousing images for different attributes (light, sound, and smell). Statistical analysis indicates that estimates based on images display many of the same patterns as those based on physical stimuli. The major exception involves sequence effects, present for actual stimuli but not for images. An outstanding issue in cognitive psychology centers on the degree to which the subjective magnitude aroused by an image corresponds to that aroused by the physical stimulus itself (Finke, 1985; Kosslyn, 1987; Shepard & Cooper, 1982). Empirical evidence supports the view that many of the brain structures underlying perceptual, primarily visual, processes are the same as those responsible for imagery (
Mental imagery doesn't work like that
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2002
subsequent visual learning. Moreover, this effect revealed a significant interaction with age. Specifically, for subjects aged 13 years and above learning performance was significantly higher if preceded by a haptic rather than a visual exploration. For children aged 10 -11 years visual and haptic exploration proved equally efficient, whereas for younger children (8-9 years) only a visual exploration gave them a significant advantage relative to the control condition.