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planes (Lambert, 2011). Before they fade, mental
images may occur without external stimuli.
Imagery plays some role in making associations
- mental connections between thoughts, feelings,
ideas, or sensations. We can remember (or even
better, vividly imagine) a feeling, emotion, or sen-
sation that is linked to a person, object, or idea. For
this reason mental imagery plays a pivotal role in
building memory and motivation; one feels more
interested and more emotionally involved in the
work by creating mental images of objects and
concepts one has been working on. With the use
of visual imagery we may mentally draw images
from short-term memory representations or even
generate images that we have never seen. We can
then mentally inspect images by zooming and
scanning them, encode the patterns of images into
memory, remember new combinations of patterns
or imagine new patterns.
“Report from Colorado” is an appreciative
record of the celebration of community life with
its colorful events (Figure 4). In an abstract way, it
relates to our symbolic representations that build
our knowledge and culture.
In a similar way as we may create and ma-
nipulate various programs, we may use abstract
concepts without direct experience.
See Table 3 for Your Visual Response.
As stated by Stephen Kosslyn (Borst & Koss-
lyn, 2008), mental imagery serves for generation,
inspection, recoding, maintenance, and transfor-
mation of images:
terns of images, 'zoom in' on isolated parts
of them, or scan across them.
Recoding: We can encode the patterns
of images into memory, remember new
combinations of patterns or imaging new
patterns.
Maintaining the Image Over Time:
However, mental images require effort to
remember them. The more perceptual units
that are included in an image, the more dif-
ficult it is to maintain.
Transforming the Image: It lies at the
heart of the use of imagery in reasoning.
For example, we can rotate patterns in im-
ages, also in the third dimension, so that
we 'see' new portions as they come into
view. We also can imagine objects growing
or shrinking, add or delete their parts, or
change the color.
Investigations from the seventies and eight-
ies provided data about the correspondence
between imagery and perception. Researchers
are examining whether perception and imagery
are different processes. Several areas in the brain
depict phenomenal experience during perception
by encoding image representations. Physiological
recordings such as using EEG show alpha waves
(8-12 Hz) across the occipital regions after imag-
ing visual stimuli, across the parietal region after
imaging tactile stimuli, and the occipital region
when imaging visual references of words. Cere-
bral blood flow increases in the occipital region
during daydreaming.
Imagery seemed to be unrelated to the right
hemisphere only (Kosslyn, 1980). Left hemisphere
can also generate images; they are further trans-
formed in right hemisphere. Split-brain patients
generate mental images mainly in a right hemi-
sphere, in waking life and also in dreams; they
imagine letters mostly with right hemisphere, and
the configuration and spatial pattern of imagined
objects mostly with left hemisphere. Electrical
Generation: Activation of information
stored in long-term memory and construc-
tion of a representation in short-term mem-
ory; we do not have images all of the time.
Images come and go, through short-term
memory representations. One can “men-
tally draw” in imagery, producing images
of patterns never actually seen.
Inspecting the Object in the Image: We
must have a way of interpreting the pat-
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