Pictures conjured by the mind’s eye lack detail, despite how vividly you picture them
Here were the simple instructions given by a Harvard University assistant professor to people participating in a recent cognitive science study:
Ullman and his colleagues term this absence of details “noncommitment” to mental imagery. Psychologists and philosophers have noted the phenomenon before, but a new study published online May 18 in Cognition is the first attempt to gather data on it. The findings show noncommitment is the norm. It has nothing to do with a person forgetting the contents of a mental image, and it also is found in people with vivid imaginations.
It’s true that some people lack mental imagery entirely, a phenomenon known as “aphantasia,” but most people say they see things vividly in their mind’s eye, and their bodies even respond as expected to what is imagined. When people visualize dark and light objects, their pupils dilate—unless they happen to have aphantasia. Brain imaging studies also show that mental imagery engages the same neurons in similar ways as perception.
The researchers next looked at the relationship between the vividness of people’s imaginations and noncommitment by using both standard questionnaire measures and participants’ own ratings of how vividly they pictured the scenes. There was an association between these measures of vividness and how many properties people visualized, but it was very weak, suggesting noncommitment has little to do with vividness. “You get people saying the image in their head is ‘super vivid, like real life.
Perception itself is far from infallible. Research into “inattentional blindness” shows that even highly conspicuous things, such as a gorilla on a basketball court, can go completely unnoticed. These limits suggest a potential next step: “It would be interesting to briefly flash up a scene and have participants report what they saw,” Kosslyn says, “then compare that with the corresponding imagery study.
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