The Case for Mental Imagery

The Case for Mental Imagery
Author: Stephen M. Kosslyn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2006-03-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0195179080

When we try to remember whether we left a window open or closed, do we actually see the window in our mind? If we do, does this mental image play a role in how we think? For almost a century, scientists have debated whether mental images play a functional role in cognition. In The Case for Mental Imagery, Stephen Kosslyn, William Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis present a complete and unified argument that mental images do depict information, and that these depictions do play a functional role in human cognition. They outline a specific theory of how depictive representations are used in information processing, and show how these representations arise from neural processes. To support this theory, they seamlessly weave together conceptual analyses and the many varied empirical findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In doing so, they present the conceptual grounds for positing this type of internal representation and summarize and refute arguments to the contrary. Their argument also serves as a historical review of the imagery debate from its earliest inception to its most recent phases, and provides ample evidence that significant progress has been made in our understanding of mental imagery. In illustrating how scientists think about one of the most difficult problems in psychology and neuroscience, this book goes beyond the debate to explore the nature of cognition and to draw out implications for the study of consciousness. Student and professional researchers in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience will find The Case for Mental Imagery to be an invaluable resource for understanding not only the imagery debate, but also and more broadly, the nature of thought, and how theory and research shape the evolution of scientific debates.

Imagery in Teaching and Learning

Imagery in Teaching and Learning
Author: Jerome S. Allender
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1991-03-30
Genre: Education
ISBN:

As Jerome S. Allender began to study how elementary school children can use mental imagery to facilitate learning arithmetic, spelling, and vocabulary, it became apparent that imagery techniques were also highly effective tools in the adult learning process, the improvement of teaching skills, and the enhancement of the human learning experience in general. These findings, accompanied by supporting data and then given practical application, form the core of this volume, explaining how imagery activities access learning potential. Four unique world views form the framework for the study as each examination of mental imagery procedures is guided by quantitative research, action research, qualitative research, or humanistic research principles. This comparative approach broadens the scope of the work to include not only relevance in the classroom, but also exploration of the role imagery plays in the interaction of fantasy and reality. Researchers will be intrigued by the scientific methodology Allender employs in his study, and teachers will appreciate the practical applications as he investigates a topic whose implications are as limitless as the imagination itself.

Exploiting Mental Imagery with Computers in Mathematics Education

Exploiting Mental Imagery with Computers in Mathematics Education
Author: Rosamund Sutherland
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642577717

The advent of fast and sophisticated computer graphics has brought dynamic and interactive images under the control of professional mathematicians and mathematics teachers. This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology takes a comprehensive and critical look at how the computer can support the use of visual images in mathematical problem solving. The contributions are written by researchers and teachers from a variety of disciplines including computer science, mathematics, mathematics education, psychology, and design. Some focus on the use of external visual images and others on the development of individual mental imagery. The book is the first collected volume in a research area that is developing rapidly, and the authors pose some challenging new questions.

Mental Imaginery in the Child

Mental Imaginery in the Child
Author: Jean Piaget
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1136221883

First published in 1997. Volume 6 in the series titled Jean Piaget: Selected Works. The authors of this title, having studied all aspects of the development of intellectual operations, and having attempted to analyse some of the characteristics of perceptual development, felt it was necessary to tackle the question of the evolution of mental images. These ten chapters provide digestible commentary and discussion on the classification, reproduction, and transformation of mental images - with focus on kinetic images, anticipatory images and the spatial image.

Mental Imagery

Mental Imagery
Author: R.G. Kunzendorf
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1489926232

The current book presents select proceedings from the Eleventh Annual Conference of AASMI (The American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery) in Washington, DC, 1989, and from the Twelfth Annual Conference of AASMI in Lowell and Boston, MA, 1990. This presentation of keynote addresses, research papers, and clinical workshops reflects a broad range of theoretical positions and a diverse repertoire of methodological approaches. Within this breadth and diversity, however, four aspects of the nature of imagery stand out: its mental nature, its private nature, its conscious nature, and its symbolic nature. The mental nature of imagery--i.e., its epistemological aspect--is explored in the book's first section of articles by Marcia Johnson, Laura Snodgrass, Leonard Giambra and Alicia Grodsky, Vija Lusebrink, Selina Kassels, Helane Rosenberg and Yakov Epstein, M. Elizabeth D'Zamko and Lynne Schwab, and Laurence Martel. These first eight articles fall, essentially, into various domains of cognitive psychology, including the psychology of art and educational psychology. In the second section, the private nature of imagery is studied by Ernest Hartmann, Nicholas Spanos, Benjamin Wallace, Deirdre Barrett, John Connolly, James Honeycutt, Dominique Gendrin, and James Honeycutt and J. Michael Gotcher. These studies, which fall within the realm of personality and social psychology, bring to light the fact that many very public interpersonal behaviors reflect very private images. Such behaviors range from interpersonal rapport with a hypnotist, to rapport with a forensic jury.

Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches to Mental Imagery

Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches to Mental Imagery
Author: M. Denis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9400913915

The locus of concreteness effects in memory for verbal materials has been described here in terms of the processing of shared and distinctive information. This theoretical view is consistent with a variety of findings previously taken as support for dual coding, insofar as both verbal and perceptual information may be involved in comprehending high-imagery sentences and in learning lists of concrete words. But going beyond previous accounts of imagery, this view also can provide explanations for several findings that appear contradictory to the thesis that concrete and abstract materials differ in the form of their storage in long-term memory. Although this does not rule out a role for imagery in list learning or text comprehension, it is clear that the complex processes involved in comprehension and memory for language go beyond mechanisms supplied by a theory based on the availability of modality-specific mental representations. The task now is to determine the viability of the theory in other domains. Several domains of imagery research presented at EWIC provided fertile ground for evaluating my theoretical viewpoint. Although not all provide a basis for distinguishing representational theories of imagery from the imagery as process view, there are data in several areas that are more consistent with the latter than the former. In other cases, there are at least potential sources of evidence that would allow such a distinction.

Imagery and Cognition

Imagery and Cognition
Author: Cesare Cornoldi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1468464078

Si nce the beginning of the 1970's the psychological study of imagery has shown a renewal of scientific interest reflected in a di verse body of theory, research paradigms, and data, which, with dil1iculty, ean be managed by a reader interested in imagery. Further, ment. al i lllagery appears to be an important construct in fields such as perception, memory, learning, thinking, motor behavior, cognitive development, and so on. With the diversity of theoretical and empirical work on imagery, cognition, and performance, it is increasingly problemut. ic to find a single source that provides contemporary overviews ill each field. Our purpose in organizing this book was to attempt all IIp-Lodate presentation of imagery research and theory. It is ollr hope that the volume will help serve as a starting point for the progress that will surely appear in the 1990's. This book hi:\:; its roots in the Second Workshop on Imagery and Cognition held at the University of Padova, Padova, Italy from September 21 to September 23,1988. An impressive array of research was presented at the workshop, and as the workshop unfolded several salient point. s elllerged. Though the research was diverse, it was even more so convergent on several main themes (e. g. , relations betweeen imagery and perception, imaginal coding in working memory, the role of imagery in v(;rbal memory and in memory for action events, imagery and problem solving).

Mental Imagery

Mental Imagery
Author: Joel Pearson
Publisher: Frontiers E-books
Total Pages: 195
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 2889191494

Our ability to be conscious of the world around us is often discussed as one of the most amazing yet enigmatic processes under scientific investigation today. However, our ability to imagine the world around us in the absence of stimulation from that world is perhaps even more amazing. This capacity to experience objects or scenarios through imagination, that do not necessarily exist in the world, is perhaps one of the fundamental abilities that allows us successfully to think about, plan, run a dress rehearsal of future events, re-analyze past events and even simulate or fantasize abstract events that may never happen. Empirical research into mental imagery has seen a recent surge, due partly to the development of new neuroscientifc methods and their clever application, but also due to the increasing discovery and application of more objective methods to investigate this inherently internal and private process. As the topic is cross hosted in Frontiers in Perception Science and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, we invite researchers from different fields to submit opinionated but balanced reviews, new empirical, theoretical, philosophical or technical papers covering any aspect of mental imagery. In particular, we encourage submissions focusing on different sensory modalities, such as olfaction, audition somatosensory etc. Similarly, we support submissions focusing on the relationship between mental imagery and other neural and cognitive functions or disorders such as visual working memory, visual search or disorders of anxiety. Together, we hope that collecting a group of papers on this research topic will help to unify theory while providing an overview of the state of the field, where it is heading, and how mental imagery relates to other cognitive and sensory functions.