Visuospatial Reasoning

Visual Images

Demonstrating the psychological reality of images entailed showing that they preserved visual properties of the objects they represented, such as size, shape, distance, orientation, and color. In that spirit, some studies have shown that the time to mentally detect or compare those properties in images reflects actual differences in size, distance, or orientation. Other studies have shown that judgments of imagined shape or color yield the same similarity spaces as judgments of perceived shape or color. This approach views imagery as internalized perception. That is, having an image is like having a percept, and performing mental transformations on an image is like perceiving changes in the world. Impressive support for the psychological reality of visual images and the transformations performed on them has come from brain studies that have shown that visual imagery relies on some of the same areas of the brain involved in visual perception.

Mental Transformations

It is common in analyses of cognition to distinguish mental representations of aspects of the world from mental transformations of those representations, a distinction analogous to data and operations performed on data. One of the more remarkable visuospatial mental transformations demonstrated is mental rotation: the time to judge whether a pair of figures at different orientations, such as a configuration of boxes or an asymmetric letter of the alphabet, is the same or whether mirror images increase linearly with the degree of tilt, as if the mind were rotating the figures into congruence at a steady rate. Mental rotation has a real-life role in identifying and imagining objects that are not upright. Mental size and shape transformations also seem to be in the service of object recognition and, like mental rotation, can be appropriated for the kind of creative thought that serves rearranging furniture, understanding how molecules fit together, or designing a building. These are mental transformations of objects in space. Another major class of visuospatial mental transformation is imagining reorientations of one's own body in space, a set of skills that plays roles in tasks such as navigating a crowd or a new neighborhood, dancing, and playing Frisbee.

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