Imagery and the Brain • 279- Is imagery just a “laboratory phenomenon,” or does it occur in real life?
- Make a list of the important events in the history of the study of imagery
in psychology, from the imageless thought debate of the 1800s to the
studies of imagery that occurred early in the cognitive revolution in
the 1960s. - How did Kosslyn use the technique of mental scanning (in the boat and
island experiments) to demonstrate similarities between perception
and imagery? Why were Kosslyn’s experiments criticized, and how did
Kosslyn answer Pylyshyn’s criticism with additional experiments? - Describe the spatial (or depictive) and propositional explanations of the
mechanism underlying imagery. How can the propositional explanation
interpret the results of Kosslyn’s boat and island image-scanning
experiments? - What is the tacit knowledge explanation of imagery experiments? What
experiment was done to counter this explanation? - How have experiments demonstrated interactions between imagery and
perception? What additional evidence is needed to help settle the imagery
debate, according to Farah?
Imagery and the Brain
As we look at a number of types of physiological experi-
ments, we will see that a great deal of evidence points to
a connection between imagery and perception, but the
overlap is not perfect. We begin by looking at the results
of research that has measured the brain’s response to
imagery and will then consider how brain damage affects
the ability to form visual images.IMAGERY NEURONS IN THE BRAIN
Studies in which activity is recorded from single neurons
in humans are rare. But Gabriel Kreiman and coworkers
(2000) were able to study patients who had electrodes
implanted in various areas in their medial temporal lobe
(see Figure 7.17) in order to determine the source of
severe epileptic seizures that could not be controlled by
medication.
They found neurons that responded to some
objects but not to others. For example, the records in
● Figure 10.12a show a particular neuron that responds
to a picture of a baseball, but does not respond to a pic-
ture of a face. Not only does this neuron respond to see-
ing baseballs but not faces, it also fi res to baseballs and
not faces when the person closes his eyes and imagines
a baseball (good fi ring) or a face (no fi ring), as shown
in Figure 10.12. Kreiman calls these neurons imagery
neurons. What’s especially signifi cant about these imag-
ery neurons is that they respond both to perceiving an
object and to imagining it.TEST YOURSELF 10.1
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