Eye movements during mental imagery are not epiphenomenal but assist the process of image generation. Commands to the eyes for each fixation are stored along with the visual representation and are used as spatial index in a motor‐based coordinate system for the proper arrangement of parts of an image. In two experiments, subjects viewed an irregular checkerboard or color pictures of fish and were subsequently asked to form mental images of these stimuli while keeping their eyes open. During the perceptual (...) phase, a group of subjects was requested to maintain fixation onto the screen's center, whereas another group was free to inspect the stimuli. During the imagery phase, all of these subjects were free to move their eyes. A third group of subjects (in Experiment 2) was free to explore the pattern but was requested to maintain central fixation during imagery. For subjects free to explore the pattern, the percentage of time spent fixating a specific location during perception was highly correlated with the time spent on the same (empty) locations during imagery. The order of scanning of these locations during imagery was correlated to the original order during perception. The strength of relatedness of these scanpaths and the vividness of each image predicted performance accuracy. Subjects who fixed their gaze centrally during perception did the same spontaneously during imagery. Subjects free to explore during perception, but maintaining central fixation during imagery, showed decreased ability to recall the pattern. We conclude that the eye scanpaths during visual imagery reenact those of perception of the same visual scene and that they play a functional role. (shrink)

How we see and how we visualize: why the scientific account differs from our experience.

A visual imagery task is presented which is beyond the limits of normal human ability, and some of the factors contributing to its difficulty are isolated by comparing the difficulty of related tasks. It is argued that complex objects are assigned hierarchical structural descriptions by being parsed into parts, each of which has its own local system of significant directions. Two quite different schemas for a wire‐frame cube are used to illustrate this theory, and some striking perceptual differences to which (...) they give rise are described. The difficulty of certain mental imagery tasks is shown to depend on which of the alternative structural descriptions of an object is used, and this is interpreted as evidence that structural descriptions are an important component of mental images. Finally, it is argued that analog transformations like mental folding involve changing the values of continuous variables in a structural description. (shrink)

Several recent accounts claim that imagination is a matter of simulating perceptual acts. Although this point of view receives support from both phenomenological and empirical research, I claim that Jean-Paul Sartre's worry formulated in L'imagination (1936) still holds. For a number of reasons, Sartre heavily criticizes theories in which the sensory material of imaginative acts consists in reviving sensory impressions. Based on empirical and philosophical insights, this article explains how simulation theories of imagination can overcome Sartre's critique by paying attention (...) to the motor dimension of imagination. Intending to clarify the status of the sensory in imagination, a motor theory of imagination is presented in which the sensory component of imagination is interpreted in terms of anticipated sensory consequences of preparation for motor action. (shrink)

An introduction to the science and philosophy of mental imagery.

In their study of reasoning with diagrammatic and non-diagrammatic representations, Larkin and Simon (1987) are concerned with _external_ representations and explicitly avoid drawing inferences about the bearing of their work on the issue of internal, mental representations. Nonetheless, we may infer the bearing of their work on internal representations from the theories of Kosslyn, Finke and other ‘pictorialists’ who take internal representations to be importantly like external ones regarding their ‘privileged’ spatial properties of depicting and resembling their referents. Thus, Finke (...) (1990) suggests that “perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be “interpreted” much like physical objects” (1990, p. 18). Elsewhere he suggests that “The image discoveries which then ‘emerge’ resemble the way perceptual discoveries can follow the active exploration and manipulation of physical objects” (1990, p. 171). (shrink)

This paper offers a phenomenology of the structure and scope of imagination's cognitive significance. It does so through discussing the unifying role of imagination in self-consciousness, and then the way in which this role is continued through the making of pictures in physical media such as drawing and painting. The study begins with discussion of four key features in terms of which imagination is often characterized. Particular emphasis is assigned to the quasi-sensory aspect. Part one then explains imagination as a (...) capacity subject to the will, whose exercise enables a 'blending'between the object imagined and the subjective style in which it is imagined. Through imagining, the imaginer comes to inhabit the object. Parts two and three explore this inhabiting in relation to memory and the imagining of possibility per se. Part four explains how picturing takes imaginative inhabiting to a level of completion. (shrink)

This book does several things, and it does them all well. Yolton firmly contextualizes the debates about perception within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while showing how these debates are often repeated in contemporary philosophy of mind. Along the way, he provides novel interpretations of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant that are clearly and convincingly presented. Perhaps the most important feature of his treatment is that it so vividly shows the Moderns grappling with issues about perception that continue to (...) plague us. The uniting theme of the work is Yolton’s insistence that direct realism and representationalism are compatible. Yolton’s defense of direct realism is largely motivated by the thesis that many philosophers incorrectly take a representational theory of mind to necessitate indirect realism. This mistake arises, according to Yolton, because they suppose that the representations themselves become the objects of perception and therefore stand between the perceiver and the world of objects. Yolton’s argument that the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were struggling to establish two interactive relations between perceivers and the physical world underlies his compatibility thesis: There is a physical and causal relationship and, more importantly, there is what Yolton calls a “cognitive” or “semantic” relationship. The latter relationship holds the key to the compatibility of representationalism with direct realism. (shrink)

This paper examines the standard conceptualizations of the notion of hallucination in light of various non-ordinary phenomenological patterns associated with altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive agents. It is argued that in general, the conceptualizations encountered in the literature do not do justice to the richness and complexity that the psychological phenomenology actually exhibits. A close inspection of this phenomenology reveals some pertinent distinctions which are usually not made in the scientific literature. On the one hand, the discussion is (...) based on first-hand experiences and, on the other hand, it is grounded in empirical and theoretical cognitive investigations of the phenomenology of human consciousness. Theoretically, the discussion is grounded in an approach highlighting the centrality of experience, meaning and action in cognition. (shrink)

John Yolton describes this collection of nine essays as "a kind of a sequel" to his 1984 book Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. Four of the chapters have previously appeared in print, and most can stand on their own, presuming little or no familiarity with previous chapters. Indeed, the title is somewhat misleading, for the material is not presented in chronological fashion, and there is little attention given to Leibniz and none to Spinoza--not what one would expect to find (...) in a history from Descartes to Kant. (shrink)