This book collects some of the most exciting pioneering work in perceptual and cognitive psychology. The authors' quantitative approach to the study of mental images and their representation is clearly depicted in this invaluable volume of research which presents, interprets, evaluates, and extends their work. The selections are preceded by a thorough review of the history of their experiments, and all of the articles have been updated with reviews of the current literature. The book's first part focuses on (...) mental rotation; the second includes other, more complex transformations and sequences of transformations. A third part describes work on rotational transformations in the context of the perceptual illusion of &"apparent motion.&" Roger N. Shepard is Professor of Psychology, Stanford University. Lynn A. Cooper is Professor of Psychology, University of Arizona. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, Mariana (...) Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals. (shrink)

Husserl’s extensive analyses of image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and of the imagination (Phantasie) offer insightful and detailed structural explications. However, despite this careful work, Husserl’s discussions fail to overcome the need to rely on a most problematic concept: mental images. The epistemological conundrums triggered by the conceptual framework of mental images are well known—we have only to remember the questions regarding knowledge acquisition that plagued British empiricism. Beyond these problems, however, a plethora of important questions arise from (...) claiming that mental images are structural moments of imaging and imagining. Any attempt to clarify the structure and conditions for the possibility of aesthetic experience must first provide an unambiguous account of pictorial depiction—a task unattainable through the mental images discourse. Similarly, exposing the import of the imagination for theoretical scientific inquiries (be they positive or eidetic) requires an initial explication of the structure of this consciousness; this explication, however, must address our ability to imagine non-spatially determined objects—something the conceptual framework of mental images utterly fails to accomplish. In this paper I argue against Husserl’s reliance on mental images in his phenomenological analyses of imaging and imagining and propose an alternative structural account for both. This account is free of this reliance and able to steer clear of its insidious implications for epistemology, aesthetics, and methodological reflections. By closely following the development of Husserl’s account I suggest alternative descriptions while building on Husserl’s important work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues for a unique role of imagination and mental images in the moral education of students. Imagination is rendered here as a capacity oriented toward realizable and salient goals; mental images are understood as particular future-oriented self-representations (FOSRs) devised by and held in imagination. FOSRs have four moral attributes: they are 1) expressive of us as moral agents, 2) shape our moral identity, 3) serve as moral pointers, and 4) help devise mitigating strategies. (...) FOSRs can be created and utilized in educational settings to further the goals of moral education by i) fostering sensitivity to moral situations among students, ii) motivating learners to act morally, iii) facilitating environments supportive of moral practice and moral habituation, and iv) helping strengthen cross-situational consistency of moral action. The four moral attributes of future-oriented self-representations (FOSRs) (1–4) that are to be engaged in moral education to further its goals (i–iv) are correlated with four elements of moral education, namely: a) moral awareness; b) moral competency; c) moral motivation; and d) moral capacity. To argue for the special role of imagination and mental images in moral education this paper integrates philosophical research and conceptual and empirical studies in psychology and education on the morality of imagination and mental images. (shrink)

Recent literature have underlined the connections between children’s reading skills and capacity to create and use mental representations or mental images; furthermore data highlighted the involvement of visuospatial abilities both during math learning and during subsequent developmental phases in performing math tasks. The present research adopted a longitudinal design to assess whether the processes of mental imagery in preschoolers (ages 4–5 years) are predictive of mathematics skills, writing and reading, in the early years of primary school (...) (ages 6–7 years). The research lasted for two school years; in the first phase, the general group of participants consisted of 100 children, and although all participants agreed to be part of the research, in the second phase, there was a mortality rate of 30%. In order to measure school learning and mental imagery processes four batteries of tests were used. The mental imagery battery evaluated mental generation, inspection and transformation processes. Data underlined that the different aspects in which mental imagery processes are articulated are differently implied in some skills that constitute school learning. These findings emphasise the potential usefulness of a screening for mental imagery ability for schoolchildren to adopt effective measures to increase their mental imagery abilities. (shrink)

This essay explores the implications of a commonly held ancient and medieval belief that human memory and invention are, if not exactly the same, the closest thing to it. In order to create, in order to think at all, human beings require both a well-provisioned stock of memory-held knowledge and some mental tool or machine, an engine which lives in the intricate networks of their own memories. In the verbal arts of the trivium students learned the basic principles of (...) memory training: the need for divisio, the need to make a clear, distinct location for each piece of memorized content, and the need to mark items uniquely for secure recollection. Frequently these mental structures took the form of images. Evidence for such memorial and compositional images is common: I focus on a few representative types, including the sermon-related “Cherub” figure of the later Middle Ages, and accounts by Cassiodorus and others of scholars, even when blind, using their highly structured memories to compose new work. (shrink)

My topic is a certain view about mental images: namely, the ‘Multiple Use Thesis’. On this view, at least some mental image-types, individuated in terms of the sum total of their representational content, are potentially multifunctional: a given mental image-type, individuated as indicated, can serve in a variety of imaginative-event-types. As such, the presence of an image is insufficient to individuate the content of those imagination-events in which it may feature. This picture is argued for, or (...) (more usually) just assumed to be true, by Christopher Peacocke, Michael Martin, Paul Noordhof, Bernard Williams, Alan White, and Tyler Burge. It is also presupposed by more recent authors on imagination such as Amy Kind, Peter Kung and Neil Van Leeuwen. I reject various arguments for the Multiple Use Thesis, and conclude that instead we should endorse SINGLE: a single image-type, individuated in terms of the sum total of its intrinsic representational content, can serve in only one imagination event-type, whose content coincides exactly with its own, and is wholly determined by it. Plausibility aside, the interest of this thesis is also in its iconoclasm, as well as the challenge it poses for the diverse theories that rest on the truth of the Multiple Use Thesis. (shrink)

In the past decade there has been renewed interest in the study of mental imagery. Emboldened by new findings from neuroscience, many people have revived the idea that mental imagery involves a special format of thought, one that is pictorial in nature. But the evidence and the arguments that exposed deep conceptual and empirical problems in the picture theory over the past 300 years have not gone away. I argue that the new evidence from neural imaging and clinical (...) neuropsychology does little to justify this recidivism because it does not address the format of mental images. I also discuss some reasons why the picture theory is so resistant to counterarguments and suggest ways in which non-pictorial theories might account for the apparent spatial nature of images. (shrink)

Recent research on visual mental imagery plays an important role for the study of visual hallucinations. Not only are mental images involved in various cognitive processes, but they also share many processes with visual perception. However, we rarely confuse mental images with percepts, and recent neuroimaging studies shed light on the mechanisms that are differently activated in imagery and perception.

Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, Mariana (...) Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that sensory images – “mental pictures” or other sense-based images of various situations – provide the best evidence for what is possible. In this paper I identify the best argument for this conclusion, but contend that it shows that certain non-sensory representations provide good evidence for possibility as well. That is, though I endorse the claim that the sensory imagination can be a source of evidence for what is possible, I (...) deny that it is the only source. I also sketch some consequences of this view for the thesis that sensations and perceptual experiences are identical to physical states. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

Mental imagery is an important topic in classical and modern philosophy, as it is central to the study of knowledge; since subjects can recall features of perceptual experiences in different ways and times, even modifying their structure, in this brief essay we will focus on non-perceptive mental images and to this purpose we will analyse, on the one hand, the nature of perceptive mental images ; on the other hand, NPMI generation according to different strategic (...) conditions and retrieval modalities and, so, their structural relationships with PMI. Thus, we will clarify what NPMI amounts to and, to this purpose, we will address the issue of epistemic correlation and semantic reference. As regards the former, we will adopt the notion of ‘belief’, both to describe which attitude supports the use of an NPMI and to account for its relationship with a PMI. As regards the latter, we will talk about weak ontology between an NPMI and the world, to conceive ‘the way in which’ mental imagery, despite the absence of a sensorial modification, refers to physical objects. As the subject’s mental contents determine, but do not constrain, what NPMI is like, we will deal with the ‘involvement’ of prior knowledge and the notion of meaningful space to underline that its generation is always the result of a wide process which involves perceptive visual information already processed and stored together with further mental contents. So, though some Authors consider mental imagery to be a ‘percept-like’ image and, somehow, espouse the theory of reactivation, we will pose a challenge to this theory – i.e. to what we call mental imagery standard framework – describing an NPMI in terms of configurational setting and indeterminacy. Consequently, we will propose a non-linear dynamic framework of mental imagery generation , according to which an NPMI is not reducible to a mere recalling of figural features of a perceptive image. (shrink)

In an article entitled ?The Ontological Status of Mental Images?, Robert Audi rejects the view presented in Hannay's Mental Images: A Defence, and proposes ?the property account of imaging? as an alternative. Some of the strengths and weaknesses of Audi's proposal are discussed, and a more detailed and specific version of the property account offered; it is suggested that imaging ? should be described as entertaining the thought that if one were looking at (or smelling, touching, (...) hearing, etc.) x, things would appear ? (shrink)

Sartre attacks the "illusion" that mental images are "immanent" in consciousness. After comparing sartre with husserl, I develop his view that mental images are non-Perceptual phenomena involving a relationship with something non-Present. From the impoverished, Unworldly view that results, I suggest that sartre's own view is still too attached to the perceptual analogy and conclude with the richer, Alternative view of ricoeur that imaginal fiction has a constructive role in shaping reality.

After thirty years of the current “imagery debate,” it appears far from resolved, even though there seems to be a growing acceptance that a cortical display cannot be identified directly with the experienced mental image, nor can it account for the experimental findings on imagery, at least not without additional ad hoc assumptions. The commentaries on the target article range from the annoyed to the supportive, with a surprising number of the latter. In this response I attempt to correct (...) some misreadings of the target article and discuss some of the ideas and evidence introduced by the commentators – much of which I found helpful, even though they do not alter my basic thesis. I also further develop the idea that the spatial character of images may come from the way they are connected to our immediate or immediately-recalled environment (by attention or by visual indexes) and towards which we may orient while we are imaging, thus leaving the alleged spatial properties of images outside the head and freeing image-representations from having to be displayed on any surface. (shrink)

The paper focuses on mental imagery and concepts. First we discuss the possible reasons why the propositional view of representation was so successful among cognitive scientists interested in concepts. Then a novel perspective, the embodied view, is presented. Differently from the classic cognitivist view, this perspective acknowledges the importance of perceptual and motor imagery for concepts. According to the embodied perspective concepts are not given by propositional, abstract and amodal symbols but are grounded in sensorimotor processes. Neural and behavioral (...) evidence favouring this perspective is presented. The paper discusses the continuity, but also the differences, between the imagery view and the embodied view of conceptual representation. (shrink)

Bernard Harrison; XIII—Meaning and Mental Images, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 237–250, https://doi.org/10.10.

The thrust of Hannay’s work is to investigate certain arguments that support a denial that mental images are objects. His choice of thinkers is eclectic and he devotes much of the book to a detailed treatment of Ryle, Shorter, Sartre and Wittgenstein with briefer notes on Hume, Berkeley and Hobbes. Ryle’s and Shorter’s analytical approach is negatively constructed and we are only told that imagining is not a way of "seeing," and hence commands no object. This inability to (...) render a positive account of imagining as Hannay demonstrates makes their arguments vulnerable. Nor can Wittgenstein offer any positive analysis of imagination since he concerns himself with a grammatical investigation of the term "imagination" with its usual language game implications. Sartre, however, does furnish a thorough descriptive analysis of the experience of imagination and affords Hannay an opportunity to offer a viable reconstruction of Sartre’s arguments. (shrink)