Inspecting Visual Mental Images: Can People "See" Implicit Properties as Easily in Imagery and Perception?

Inspecting Visual Mental Images: Can People "See" Implicit Properties as Easily in Imagery and Perception?

Inspecting Visual Mental Images: Can People "See" Implicit Properties as Easily in Imagery and Perception?

Inspecting visual mental images: can people "see" implicit properties as easily in imagery and perception?

Can people "see" previously unnoticed properties in objects that they visualize, or are they locked into the organization of the pattern that was encoded during perception? To answer this question, we first asked a group to describe letters of the alphabet and found that some properties (such as the presence of a diagonal line) are often mentioned, whereas others (such as symmetry) are rarely i...

Mechanical reasoning by mental simulation.

Recent studies have provided evidence for mental simulation as a strategy in mechanical reasoning. This type of reasoning can be dissociated from reasoning based on descriptive knowledge in that it depends on different abilities and memory stores, is expressed more easily in gesture than in language, exhibits analog properties, and can result in correct inferences in situations where people do ...

Detecting high-level and low-level properties in visual images and visual percepts.

In this article we provide further evidence that visual mental imagery and visual perception share modality-specific mechanisms, and we find that representing visual information in a mental image (activating stored information to create a picture-like mental representation) preserves relatively low-level visual detail. Subjects either saw or visualized simple pictures, and evaluated them for th...