Eric Schwitzgebel
speaker
445 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2011
last heard Jun 2011
Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
from saying, oh yes, my visual imagery is as clear and detailed as ordinary visual eyes-open-sighted experience.
It'll go all the way from high reports like that to saying, oh, I have no imagery at all, or I have only the very faintest, tiniest little bit of imagery.
Galton took these reports at face value, and there have been over a century... That was back in 1880.
More than a century since then, there have been lots of types of questionnaires that have attempted to get at people's differences in imagery experience by asking them to self-report what their imagery experience is like.
Now...
The striking finding, I think, over the last 130 years has been that these self-reports of imagery experience do not reliably correlate with any difference in performance on psychological tasks that psychologists have typically thought involve imagery.
So a typical kind of psychological task that
might involve imagery would be a mental rotation task, where you look at two line drawings and you're asked to reach a judgment about whether one would be a rotation in three-dimensional space of the other.
Or another kind of task that might involve imagery would be you look at a piece of paper or a picture of a piece of paper with lines along
which you're supposed to imagine it being folded, and then you reach some judgment about what would that piece of paper look like after it was folded along the indicated lines.
So those kinds of tasks psychologists thought involved imagery.
Performance on those tasks does not appear to correlate with differences in people's reports of their imagery experience.
And in fact...
There have been hundreds of studies on this, and of course some of those studies come out positive, but my interpretation of the overall literature is that there's a striking lack of relationship between self-reports of imagery and performance on cognitive tests that seem to involve imagery.
Um, I think people do analogize imagery to pictures.
In fact, even more strongly, um, we'll say, you know, picture something right as a way of asking someone to imagine something, right.
It almost doesn't sound metaphorical for us to say that.
Um,
And actually one of the troubles as I was looking through the ancient Greek texts on this, and ancient Roman texts on imagery, was that translators will often translate imagery or image, imagine, as picture into English, right?
So I'm reading these
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