Ch.11

Visual imagery is a kind of mental representation of certain acquired knowledge about something that we have already experienced in the sensory world.  Our memory plays an important role in defining the features of the mental image that we construct aggregating new information every time that we learn any new thing about the same concept.  This mechanism enhances our perceptual potential about whatever we need to recall. 

Simple situations in life require this type of knowledge. Visual imagery is necessary to picture a scenario when you want to be sure if your coffee maker was still on when you left the house on a rush, for example. In a situation like that, it would be possible to visualize the mental representations of the sequences focused on the acts before you have closed the door as if you were seeing yourself by someone else perspective. Probably it would be impossible to retrieve this memory without accessing a mental image of these last scenes before making the fundamental decision of coming back to turn off the machine or keep walking to the bus stop.  

Galton’s studies about the nature of visual imagery reveal that people are subjective in creating mental representation about the same things. This evidence suggests that the ability to form visual images may vary. It highlights the idea that some people are more prone than others to visualize their thoughts and verbalizing as they are capable of creating a translation step, converting experiences into words.

However, Galton’s data demonstrates that people are not different in the way that they made inferences about their mental imagery perception, but in the way that they describe them. He considers that perhaps one single image can be described in many ways from different people if the observations are submitted to a subjective than an objective analysis. Then, is plausible to say that people who most often detect discrepancies between a book's content and a movie about the same work, for example,  may have a great ability to express their ideas with clear words emphasizing visual imagery details that can be misinterpreted by others. 

When researches define the patterns and criteria under which the visual imagery transcription should be evaluated, it creates an efficient method to investigate if the representation of visual imagery varies among people avoiding subjectivism.  Tests using the image-scanning procedure suggests through a measure of time response that participants keep the same rates while scanning specific targets throughout the mental visual image of the same map, revealing to us that visual images are better in depicting a scene than describing it.