The term mental image is used in Philosophie, in the field of the Communication and in cognitive Psychologie to describe the memorized or imagined cerebral representation of a physical object, a concept, an idea, or a situation. The capacity particularly developed of the human beings to form, memorize and use mental images, to apprehend the environment and to communicate with the others, is closely related to the human intelligence. The biologists and anthropologists are divided on this type of capacity at the other necessary species. This debate, present in biology, are generally ignored in the other fields which tend to concentrate on human knowledge. However, the adaptive intelligence, that it is human or animal, seems to be strongly related to the capacity to store, to treat and make evolve/move a capital of images and mental Représentations.
Birth and evolution of the mental images
During all our life, while probably leaving the antenatal phase of the fetus, our lived experiments make be born multitudes from elements of mental representation which come to build in our Esprit new images, or modify, to enrich by the existing images. A network of images is thus maintained, each one of them being able to call upon others. Certain privileged sequences form true dynamic méta-images, following the example neuronal ways at the base of the cerebral operation moreover low level.
Three types of experiments take part in this process:
- the Perception S by one or several of our five directions, in particular the sight which constitutes most powerful, but not only, generator of mental images. Some of these perceptions and feelings are undergone, others sought,
- the Imagination and the reflection, on which we have a certain influence,
- the Rêve, waked up visions and hallucinations which escape our conscious control and make emerge spontaneously new images.
In each one of these cases, the Cerveau handles mental representations, evaluates them, compares them, associates them, combines them, with or without external Stimuli. In its normal functioning (vs. pathological), the Cerveau seeks to maintain a stock of images which enables him to find solutions effective with the situations present and anticipated. Thus, the cognitive strategies, more or less conscious, privilege the evolution of our representations towards what we believe being reality and, in the artistic fields and of imaginary, the images sources of pleasure and satisfaction, often voluntarily dissociated from reality. In a ceaseless loop, these images, like their sequences, are evaluated according to their effectiveness to carry out our needs and objectives of any nature, then modified consequently. The cognitive Psychologie is interested in the operations which can undergo the mental images.
Philosophical approaches
The concept of mental images is central in traditional and modern philosophy, because indissociable of the study of knowledge. In its book VII of the Republic, Plato uses the well-known metaphor of a prisoner in a cave, connected and immobilized, which turns the back on the entry and sees on the wall which faces him only its shade and those projected of objects placed far behind them. This metaphor exposes in picturesque terms the perilous advance of the men towards the knowledge of the reality reduced in the Esprit of the human beings to Représentation S built starting from simplified images and deformations perceived by our directions. Plato also evokes to it not less difficult transmission of knowledge which runs up against the blindness and the hard confrontation of the mental Représentations resulting from different experiments.
At the 18th century, George Berkeley developed similar ideas in its theory of the idealism. According to Berkeley, reality would exist only through our mental images, those not being representations of material reality, but reality itself. However, Berkeley, clearly distinguished the images relating to knowledge from the outside world, of the images resulting from individual imagination. According to Berkeley, only the last cannot be considered to belong to the “mental imagery” in the contemporary direction of the term.
The British author, also at the 18th century, Dr. Samuel Johnson, whereas one read asked what he thought of the idealism (in walk in Scotland) of answered “see as I refute it! ” a kick gave some on a large rock which made rebound its leg. It showed thus that the idea of a rock existing only through one mental image, without material existence, strictly speaking, was a quite poor explanation of the causes of painful which it had just tested.
The critics of the scientific realism wonder how the interior perception of the mental images really occurs. One refers some times at the “problem of the homoncule” (see also the eye of the spirit). This problem amounts wondering how the images posted on a screen of computer exist in the memory of this last.
For the scientific materialism, the mental images and they Perception can result only from mental states. According to these philosophers, the realistic scientists cannot explain where the images and their tax collectors exist in the brain. These criticisms advance that the neurosciences did not succeed in identifying in the brain of the components, processes or memory which would treat and would store images in a way similar to a graphics card and its memory in a computer.
Use in the training
The styles of Apprentissage are largely determined by the capacities of representation and memorizing which privilege the characteristics visual, auditive, or kinesthetic (referring to the direction or the feelings of the movement or the body posture) of an experiment.
According to the theorists of education, the acquisition of knowledge is facilitated by implementation the simultaneous several sensory fields (visual, auditive, or kinesthetic). The methods of teaching implementing the word, of the gestures and posting/animation of charts and textual meet this need.
The use of existing mental images without sensory perception or physical action contributes to the training. For example, to repeat a exercise of piano, without piano, only by visualizing the keyboard (practical mental) allows to improve to a significant degree the later execution (although less effectively than the physical practice). The authors of the study associated with this experiment declared that “the only mental practice seems to be sufficient to support the modulation of the neuronal circuits implied in the first phases of acquisition of the driving automatisms. ” (Pascual-Leone 1995).
Psychoanalyze and mental images
The mental images, and in particular those coming from the Dream S, are used as a basis for the theories of Sigmund Freud on the human behavior. Its thesis stipulates that our experiments of child strongly work the mental images which we build later in our life. According to Freud, the human beings form mental images in their Inconscient according to their latent desires, these unconscious images having an important influence on the human behavior.
In experimental psychology
The cognitive psychologists and, later, the neurologists studied empirically how the human Cerveau uses the mental imagery in the construction of knowledge.
A metaphor of the Années 1970 tried to bring operation closer to the brain to that of the computer as a sequential processor of information. Zenon Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition: Toward has foundation for Cognitive Science, MIT Near, 1984. It presented the Cognition like a form of calculation and supported that the semantic contents of the mental states were coded in the same way that of the representations of computer - State of a network formed by the whole of the states of the neurons and interconnections taking part in it.
The psychologist Zenon Plyshyn developed a theory according to which the Esprit of human treats mental images by breaking up them into fundamental mathematics proposals. Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler (1971) opposed this assertion by presenting to people a figure made up of lines representing an object in three dimensions and in their asking to determine other figures so were the representation of the same object after rotation in space. Shepard and Metzler supposed that if we break up, then recompose the objects in basic mathematical proposals mentally - as the dominant thought of the time to the treatment of a computer suggested it by analogy - time to determine if the object were identical or not would then have been independent of the degree of rotation of the object. However, this experiment showed, on the contrary, that this time was proportional to the degree of rotation which had undergoes the object on the figure. Shepard and Metzler thus could deduce from it that the human brain maintains and handles the mental images as topographic and topological entities total.
More recent studies confirmed these results by highlighting that people are slower to mentally direct representations of members such as hands in directions incompatible with the rotation of the articulations of the human body (Parsons 2003) and that the patients whose arm is wounded and painful are slower to mentally turn a drawing of the hand on the side of the wounded arm (Schwoebel 2001).
Certain psychologists, including Stephen Kosslyn, suggest that these results are due to an interference between the zones of the brain which treat the visual representations and those which manage the driving representations. Kosslyn (1995 & 1994) consolidates this assumption, in a series of cerebral imageries, by showing where objects such as the letter “F” are maintained and handled, as total images, in the visual cortex.
The cognitive Sciences led to a relative consensus on the statute neural of the mental images. The majority of the researchers in psychology and neurology are appropriate that there is no homoncule (a central system which would control the unit or part of the brain) nor process which structured the vision of the mental images. The way in which these images are stored and treated, in particular in the language, the communication and in relation to our physical environment, remains a fertile field of study (Rohrer 2006) to crossed several fields: psychology, neuroscience, philosophy.
See too
Sources
I thus learn I am, ED. Organization, Paris, 1994,272 p. Trocmé-Fabre H.,
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