Imagery, Visualization, and Thinking

Abstract

Summary What is the relation between the ability to see the world and to think? For the Renaissance humanist, Leonardo da Vinci, the two processes were almost one and the same: to visualize was to think. The eye was the instrument of thought, and the artist's ability to make pictures provided a special medium in which to carry out "thought experiments." This view, however, has been supplanted by the development of quantum mechanics and other abstract disciplines in which the objects of thought are all but impossible to visualize. The manipulation of abstract representations--if it occurs--does indeed seem to be a mode of thinking that is not visual. The emphasis on abstraction and mathematics can be found in many intellectual disciplines--from logic to mechanical engineering--in which practitioners concomitantly play down the role of visualization. These pedagogical trends, however, may have little basis in fact. The aim of the present chapter is accordingly to reconsider the nature of mental representations and thinking, that is, of how the mind's eye may help the mind's mind. It will use the results of psychological experiments to reach some new conclusions about the relations between visualizing and thinking.