Eye Movements Research In The Processing Of Visual Mental Imagery

As an information representation, imagery that is based on sense and perception is a mental image in process of memory and imagination. Visual mental imagery is one kind of mental imagery.Whether mental imagery can be one special kind of mental representation and has its mental process? This question is not only a focal one in imagery research but also an important one in the whole cognitive psychology. The present study tried to give answer to the debate through eye movements research in visual mental imagery.The results indicated that mental rotation time required to recognize rotated pictures linearly increased with different angle of rotation, and when the pictures rotated 180°, the RT was the largest. During the processing, the current saccade average velocity and the current saccade duration etc had also analog mental rotation effect, that was equal with the RT. Subjects need to cost more saccade duration,fixation time and more number of saccade as well as more number of fixation to identify objects ,when the pictures was rotated from 0°to 180°.The results also showed that imagery could also be scanned and eye scanpaths during imagery were similar to those during visual perception. That is, the time of scanning linearly increased with different distance during imagery and perception phase. Moreover, regression analysis of the time and number of scanning supported that the oculomotor behavior during imagery reenacted that which occurred when perceiving the object. The present eye movements study demonstrated that mental imagery could be one special kind of mental representation and had its mental process. The mental representation of imagery is mental image but not abstract proposition in some special condition.