Visual Mental Imagery
Visual Mental Imagery - Related Videos
05:56
Mental Rotation
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2023
Source: Laboratory of Jonathan Flombaum—Johns Hopkins University Visual mental imagery refers to the ability to conjure images in one’s mind’s eye. This allows people to process visual material above and beyond the constraints of a current point-of-view; for example, a person could imagine, using their mind’s eye, how something might look in a different color, or what it would look like if it were made from a different material or rotated and seen from a different perspective. Mental imagery...
11:46
Decoding Auditory Imagery with Multivoxel Pattern Analysis
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2023
Source: Laboratories of Jonas T. Kaplan and Sarah I. Gimbel—University of Southern California Imagine the sound of a bell ringing. What is happening in the brain when we conjure up a sound like this in the "mind's ear?" There is growing evidence that the brain uses the same mechanisms for imagination that it uses for perception.1 For example, when imagining visual images, the visual cortex becomes activated, and when imagining sounds, the auditory cortex is engaged. However, to what extent are...
35:03
Mental Status Examination
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2023
Source: Carmen Black, Matthew Goldenberg, and Jaideep Talwalkar; Yale School of Medicine The mental status exam is a clinical evaluation of emotional, perceptual, and cognitive functioning that spans both the fields of psychiatry and neurology. Developing skill in the psychiatric portions of the examination are important to describe salient aspects of the patient's mental state that may be observed during routine history and/or physical exam. Proficiency in the cognitive portions of this...
09:55
Use of a Psychophysiological Script-driven Imagery Experiment to Study Trauma-related Dissociation in Borderline Personality Disorder
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Cited by 6 •
2018
We present a protocol of personalized script-driven trauma-related imagery and clinical assessments within a comparison design for investigating peritraumatic dissociation (PD), psychophysiological reactions, i.e. heart rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC), and psychological features of often severely traumatized individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD).
01:24
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
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2026
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) serves as the primary classification system for mental health disorders, providing standardized diagnostic criteria for clinicians and researchers. First published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1952, the DSM has undergone several revisions to reflect evolving psychiatric understanding. The fifth edition, DSM-5, was published in 2013, followed by its text revision, DSM-5-TR, in 2022. This revision incorporates...
FAQs
Top-down processing allows stored visual knowledge and attentional signals to activate or organize representations in the brain’s visual systems when matching external stimuli are absent. This mechanism helps explain how internally generated visual content can contribute to perception, memory, reasoning, and imagination. It also provides a framework for studying how cognition shapes visual representations.
Stored visual knowledge supplies information that can be organized into an internal visual representation, while attention helps activate or structure relevant parts of that representation. Their interaction gives imagery a functional role in cognitive tasks rather than treating it as an isolated experience. In psychology, this relationship helps researchers examine how internal images support reasoning and problem-solving.
Visual mental imagery and perception are closely related because both involve visual representations, although imagery occurs without corresponding external sensory input. Studying this relationship helps psychologists investigate how internally generated representations interact with perceptual processes. It also clarifies whether similar visual systems contribute to experiencing information from the environment and using visual content generated by the mind.
Individual differences reveal that people may vary in how they form, use, or experience internal visual representations. Researchers can examine these differences through mental rotation, image generation, and visual memory assessment tasks. Comparing performance across people helps connect imagery with broader cognitive abilities and improves understanding of how internal visual processing contributes to reasoning, memory, and planning.
Common assessment approaches include mental rotation, image generation, and visual memory tasks. Mental rotation examines how people work with changing visual representations, image generation focuses on producing internal visual content, and visual memory assessment examines retaining or using visual information. Together, these tasks provide complementary ways to investigate imagery and its role in cognition.
Internal visual representations can be used to organize information and guide thought when people plan, learn, or solve problems. In psychological research, these applications connect imagery with practical cognitive functions rather than viewing it only as imagination. Studying such uses helps explain how visual information maintained or organized in the mind can contribute to reasoning and goal-directed activity.
Combining imagery tasks with visual memory assessment can show how generating and retaining visual representations relate to one another. This approach helps researchers examine the contribution of imagery to memory and identify links between different cognitive functions. It also supports broader investigation of how visual representations participate in perception, reasoning, learning, and problem-solving.