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Visual Imagery

Visual imagery refers to the processes through which people create “mental pictures” that they can inspect with their “mind's eye.” These mental representations resemble actual depictions both subjectively and functionally and play an important role in remembering and problem solving. More broadly, they can, by virtue of their content, powerfully guide the flow of thought.

The Subjective Qualities of Visual Images

Visual images can be (and usually are) created in the absence of an actual visual stimulus—and so one can create an image of (or “visualize”) an elephant even if none is nearby. One can also create images that alter things that are in view (and so one could, for example, imagine this page with all the words printed in green ink). More ambitiously, one can create images of things that do not exist at all (e.g., an image of a unicorn). In some cases, images are created deliberately (and so someone can, if they choose, call up an image of a beautiful sunset); in other cases, the images arise spontaneously (perhaps triggered by someone else's mention of a sunset).

Visual images are not hallucinations—the person experiencing the image can tell that the image is “in their head,” and not a real sight. Nonetheless, there is a strong subjective resemblance between visual images and actual sights. This is reflected in the way people commonly talk about their visual images, and references to mental pictures or the mind's eye have been common at least since Shakespeare's time (e.g., Hamlet, Act 1, Scene ii). It is noteworthy that people feel these terms are apt; this is a strong indication that the conscious experience of having an image does resemble the experience of seeing. More specifically, the imaged object or scene seems to be “viewed” from some particular vantage point and is typically “seen” against some background; objects in the image have colors, shapes, and surface textures that are immediately “visible” and so on.

Experimental Studies of Visual Images

Here as elsewhere, though, researchers are cautious in how they interpret these self-reports on conscious experience. However, the self-reports can be corroborated via the appropriate experiments, and the data make it plain that visual images do share many functional properties with actual sights, as one would expect based on the self-report. For example, participants in one study were first asked to memorize a map of an island, including the location of several landmarks on the island. With this done, participants were asked to create a mental image of the map and then to “scan” their image from one landmark named by the experimenter to another. When these scanning times were carefully recorded, they showed a strong linear relationship between the time needed for each scan and the distance between the relevant pair of landmarks on the original map. This result confirms that the image accurately represents all the spatial relations on the map—and so points close together on the map are functionally close on the image; points further apart on the map are far apart on the image. In this fashion, the image seems truly to depict the layout (and thus all the shapes and patterns) in the scene that is being represented.

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