Imagery

Mental Imagery

A mental image occurs when a representation of an image is present, and can be reenacted when the stimulus is no longer present. Imagery plays an important role in original thought, memory, creativity, emotion, problem solving, and language and can be part of a process of introspection, of looking within.

Imagery can be created intentionally or can occur as an involuntary or unbidden image. Intentional imagery occurs when a familiar scene or melody is intentionally brought to mind. The person imaging creates a facsimile of the color, shape, and form of the visual image, or creates the timbre of sound as in an auditory image. Imagery is not exclusively visual: intentional uses of imagery can be visual (in the mind's eye), auditory (in the mind's ear), tactile (in the mind's skin), or embodied (felt within the body's organs, e.g., the chest opening out, chills up/down the spine).

The current debate about mental imagery focuses on two alternative viewpoints: whether the image is depictive or a propositional representation. The propositional representational school asserts that images are symbolic representations that require a lexicon in order for meaning to be assigned. The depictive school asserts that there is not one explicit symbol for an image but rather that depictions can be ambiguous and differ from person to person, in that images are preorganized into properties that have meaning for the person creating the image. An imagined object, however, does not imply that the person actually sees (or hears) the specific stimulus. A person seeing an image may comment that they perceive it as if dissociated from it, whereas another may describe being “in” the image.

Intentional imagery can allow one to try something out before committing to it; one imagines something that might be as if to rehearse possible outcomes. One imagines the consequences of an act of behavior as a means of testing the feasibility of the act/behavior. Intentional imagery also plays a role in creativity, in imaging what might be. For Albert Einstein, imagination was more important than knowledge, suggesting the ability to imagine something yet to be as being the core of investigation and discovery.

However, a more illusive form of image is that which appears unintentionally or as an unbidden image. Such images occur in daydreaming and may be activated by associations held in long-term memory. Memory images can be recalled vividly, for example, imaging the room in which childhood was spent, such as a bedroom or playroom. Eidetic images are an especially vivid form of memory image that can be multisensory, for example, recalling sound, taste, and smell associated with the image.

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