Essence Of Mental Imagery: Reflection On The Theoretical Research On Mental Imagery

Investigations of mental imagery can be traced back over more than 2,500 years,and they were an important part of the earliest attempt to devise a scientific psychology in the 19th century, and at the forefront of the initial development of cognitive psychology in the 1960s. Since then, research on mental imagery has presented a challenge for cognitive psychology by generating new kinds of theory concerning potential mental representations and new methods for investigating those representations. For a long time, discussion of mental imagery was always twined with two concepts, ideas and representation, which are just philosophical terms before the generation of scientific psychology. Great importance was not attached to mental imagery until early experimental psychology, when "imageless thought controversy" was a fairly good example. More and more psychologists were engaged in research of mental imagery from the 1960s. Cognitive psychologists, for example John T.E. Richardson, found that, mental imagery can be seen as a phenomenal experience ,an internal representation and a mnemonic strategy. At present there are three kinds of theories which were generated to describe the attributes of mental imagery and to explain the mechanism of mental imagery. They are double-coding theory by Pavio,A., Concept-proposition theory by Anderson, J.R. and image-compute theory by Kosslyn, S.M.The phenomenal experience of imagery has to be investigated by collecting verbal accounts. These can be obtained by means of questionnaires. First, Galton devised "breakfast-table questionnaire" to assess the difference of imagery experience. And he found that there was considerable diversity in the experience of mental imagery among the general population. Betts and Marks followed him and devised two instruments, QMI and VVIQ. What's more, Gorton found the difference among people when they control their mental imagery. They contributed us with the research of personal differences on the experience of mental imagery.Mental imagery is not only a phenomenal experience, but a medium or a form of internal representation in which information about the appearance of physical objects, events, and scenes can be depicted and manipulated. Usually, mental imagery is considered to be beneficial to gain higher scores in tests of spatial ability. And the results of mental rotation and mental scanning suggested that the way in which imaged objects can be manipulated corresponds to the way in which physical objects might be manipulated. That is, imagined objects are structurally equivalent to the physical objects that they represent. And they can be compared and manipulated in a manner that is analogous to the way in which real objects are compared and manipulated. Paivio thought it was because mental comparison was based on the mental imagery of corresponding real objects. The use of mental imagery as an internal representation appears to depend on a system of visuo-spatial working memory. And mental imagery can also serve as methods or content of memory. Mental rotation, mental scanning and mental comparison are not only processes of mental manipulation, but also process of memory.Thus, the thesis analyzed the history of researches on mental imagery and revealed the attributes and mechanism of mental imagery.