Imagination as Expansion of Experience

This paper proposes a developmental view on imagination: from this perspective, imagination can be seen as triggered by some disrupting event, which generates a disjunction from the person’s unfolding experience of the “real” world, and as unfolding as a loop, which eventually comes back to the actual experience. Examining recent and classical theorization of imagination in psychology, the paper opposes a deficitary view of imagination to an expansive notion of imagination. The paper explores Piaget, Vygotsky, Harris and Pelaprat & Cole consider: 1) What does provoke a “rupture” or disjunction? 2) What are the psychological processes involved in the imaginary loop? 3) What nourishes such processes? 4) What are the consequences of such imaginary loop, or what does it enable doing? The paper proposes to adopt an expansive view of imagination, as Vygotsky proposed—a perspective that has been under-explored empirically since his seminal work. To stimulate such sociocultural psychology of imagination, two empirical examples are provided, one showing how children make sense of metaphor in an experimental setting, the other showing a young person using a novel met at school as symbolic resource.     

Attribution of movement: Potential links between subjective reports of agency and output monitoring

According to agency memory theory, individuals decide whether “I did it” based on a memory trace of “I am doing it”. The purpose of this study was to validate the agency memory theory. To this end, several hand actions were individually presented as samples, and participants were asked to perform the sample action, observe the performance of that action by another person, or imagine performing the action. Online feedback received by the participants during the action was manipulated among the different conditions, and output monitoring, in which participants were asked whether they had performed each hand action, was conducted. The rate at which respondents thought that they themselves had performed the action was higher when visual feedback was unaltered than when it was altered (Experiment 1A), and this tendency was observed across all types of altered feedback (Experiment 1B). The observation of an action performed by the hand of another person did not increase the rate at which respondents thought that they themselves had performed the action unless the participants actually did perform the action (Experiments 2A and 2B). In Experiment 3, a relationship was observed between the subjective feeling that “I am the one who is causing an action” and the memory that “I did perform the action”. These experiments support the hypothesis that qualitative information and sense of “self” are tagged in a memory trace and that such tags can be used as cues for judgements when the memory is related to the “self”.     

Précis of The rational imagination: how people create alternatives to reality

The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted terrains of the mind. People often imagine how events might have turned out "if only" something had been different. The "fault lines" of reality, those aspects more readily changed, indicate that counterfactual thoughts are guided by the same principles as rational thoughts. In the past, rationality and imagination have been viewed as opposites. But research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had supposed. In The Rational Imagination, I argue that imaginative thought is more rational than scientists have imagined. People exhibit remarkable similarities in the sorts of things they change in their mental representation of reality when they imagine how the facts could have turned out differently. For example, they tend to imagine alternatives to actions rather than inactions, events within their control rather than those beyond their control, and socially unacceptable events rather than acceptable ones. Their thoughts about how an event might have turned out differently lead them to judge that a strong causal relation exists between an antecedent event and the outcome, and their thoughts about how an event might have turned out the same lead them to judge that a weaker causal relation exists. In a simple temporal sequence, people tend to imagine alternatives to the most recent event. The central claim in the book is that counterfactual thoughts are organised along the same principles as rational thought. The idea that the counterfactual imagination is rational depends on three steps: (1) humans are capable of rational thought; (2) they make inferences by thinking about possibilities; and (3) their counterfactual thoughts rely on thinking about possibilities, just as rational thoughts do. The sorts of possibilities that people envisage explain the mutability of certain aspects of mental representations and the immutability of other aspects.     

Imagination and Memory

A growing body of literature shows that imagining contrary-to-truth experiences can change memory. Recent experiments are reviewed to show that when people think about or imagine a false event, entire false memories can be implanted. Imagination inflation can occur even when there is no overt social pressure, and when hypothetical events are imagined only briefly. Overall, studies of imagination inflation show that imagining a counter-factual event can make subjects more confident that it actually occurred. We discuss possible mechanisms for imagination inflation and find that, with evidence supporting the involvement of both source confusion and familiarity in creating inflation, the primary mechanism is still to be determined. We briefly review evidence on individual differences in susceptibility to inflation. Finally, the widespread use of imagination-based techniques in self-help and clinical contexts suggests that there may be practical implications when imagination is used as a therapeutic tool.     

Putting concepts into context

At first glance, conceptual representations (e.g., our internal notion of the object “lemon”) seem static; we have the impression that there is something that the concept lemon “means” (a sour, yellow, football-shaped citrus fruit) and that this meaning does not vary. Research in semantic memory has traditionally taken this “static” perspective. Consequently, only effects demonstrated across a variety of contexts have typically been considered informative regarding the architecture of the semantic system. In this review, we take the opposite approach: We review instances of context-dependent conceptual activation at many different timescales—from long-term experience, to recent experience, to the current task goals, to the unfolding process of conceptual activation itself—and suggest that the pervasive effects of context across all of these timescales indicate that rather than being static, conceptual representations are constantly changing and are inextricably linked to their contexts.     

Einstein’s jacket: Evidence for long-term perceptual specificity in mental imagery

To what extent are visual fantasies constrained by our perceptual experience of the real world? Our study exploits the fact that people’s knowledge of the appearance of individuals from the early 20th Century (e.g., Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill) derives predominantly from viewing black-and-white media images. An initial experiment shows that mental imagery for individuals from this period are experienced as significantly less colourful than imagery for individuals from the era of colour media. A second experiment manipulated whether participants were instructed to explicitly imagine using colour or not (i.e., “imagine Albert Einstein wearing a green jacket” vs. “imagine Albert Einstein wearing a jacket”). Results show that colour manipulation only influences imagery for black-and-white era individuals, with no comparable effect on imagery for colour era individuals. This finding is replicated in a third experiment that includes an additional control condition of imagining generic characters (i.e., “Imagine a knight wearing a cloak” vs. “imagine a knight wearing a red cloak”). Again, only imagery for black-and-white era individuals is affected by the colour manipulation. Overall these results provide evidence for long-term perceptual specificity effects in mental imagery. We argue that visual fantasies can be constrained by surface features of underlying representations in memory, even when imagining something we have never directly perceived.     

Visual imagery: The past and future as seen by patients with Alzheimer’s disease

We investigated visual imagery for past and future thinking in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). We invited AD patients and controls to retrieve past events and to imagine future events. Participants also provided a “Field” response if they see the event through their own eyes, or an “Observer” response if they see themselves in the scene as a spectator would. Less “Field” and more “Observer” responses were observed in AD participants than in controls during past and future thinking, suggesting a diminished ability to mentally visualize past and future events in AD. Results also demonstrated significant positive correlations between the production of “Field” responses and specificity during past and future thinking, suggesting a relationship between the ability to mentally visualize past and future events and autobiographical overgenerality in AD.     

Characteristics of memories for near-death experiences

Near-death experiences are vivid, life-changing experiences occurring to people who come close to death. Because some of their features, such as enhanced cognition despite compromised brain function, challenge our understanding of the mind-brain relationship, the question arises whether near-death experiences are imagined rather than real events. We administered the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire to 122 survivors of a close brush with death who reported near-death experiences. Participants completed Memory Characteristics Questionnaires for three different memories: that of their near-death experience, that of a real event around the same time, and that of an event they had imagined around the same time. The Memory Characteristics Questionnaire score was higher for the memory of the near-death experience than for that of the real event, which in turn was higher than that of the imagined event. These data suggest that memories of near-death experiences are recalled as “realer” than real events or imagined events.     

Distance Learning: Empathy and Culture in Junot Diaz’s “Wildwood”

This essay discusses critical approaches to culture, difference, and empathy in health care education through a reading of Junot Diaz’s “Wildwood” chapter from the 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I begin with an analysis of the way that Diaz’s narrative invites readers to imagine and explore the experiences of others with subtlety and complexity. My reading of “Wildwood” illuminates its double-edged injunction to try to imagine another’s perspective while recognizing the limits to—or even the impossibility of—that exercise. I draw on post-colonial theory and feminist science studies to illuminate a text that is created and interpreted in a post-colonial context—the Dominican diaspora in the United States. The essay offers a model of historical and critical analysis that health care educators can use to frame the concept of empathy in the classroom and the clinic.     

Visualizing and Visualizing Representations

Opponents of “the dependency thesis” (the view that when we visualize an F what we do is imagine seeing an F) have used an analogy between visualizing and viewing visual representations to bolster their skepticism. This article explores this analogy and argues that when we set out to visualize an F, sometimes what we visualize is either (1) influenced by our prior exposure to visual representations of an F or (2) best described as a visual representation of an F. The ramifications of this are explored, both in the light of arguments over the dependency thesis, and also in the light of the surprising data that suggest that at least during the 1940s and 1950s, people dreamed in black and white.     

Embodied Simulations Are Modulated by Sentential Perspective

There is considerable evidence that language comprehenders derive lexical‐semantic meaning by mentally simulating perceptual and motor attributes of described events. However, the nature of these simulations—including the level of detail that is incorporated and contexts under which simulations occur—is not well understood. Here, we examine the effects of first‐ versus third‐person perspective on mental simulations during sentence comprehension. First‐person sentences describing physical transfer towards or away from the body (e.g., “You threw the microphone,” “You caught the microphone”) modulated response latencies when responses were made along a front‐back axis, consistent with the action‐sentence compatibility effect (ACE). This effect was not observed for third‐person sentences (“He threw the microphone,” “He caught the microphone”). The ACE was observed when making responses along a left‐right axis for third‐person, but not first‐person sentences. Abstract sentences (e.g., “He heard the message”) did not show an ACE along either axis. These results show that perspective is a detail that is simulated during action sentence comprehension, and that motoric activations are flexible and affected by the pronominal perspective used in the sentence.     

If I imagine it,then it happened: The Implicit Truth Value of imaginary representations

Imagination sometimes leads people to behave, feel, and think as though imagined events were real even when they know they were not. In this paper, we suggest that some understanding of these phenomena can be achieved by differentiating between Implicit Truth Value (ITV), a spontaneous truth evaluation, and Explicit Truth Value (ETV), a self-reported truth judgment. In three experiments, we measure ITV using the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (Sartori, Agosta, Zogmaister, Ferrara, & Castiello, 2008), which has been used to assess which of two autobiographical events is true. Our findings demonstrate that imagining an event, like experiencing an event, increases its ITV, even when people explicitly acknowledge the imagined event as false (Experiments 1a and 1b). Furthermore, we show that imagined representations generated from a first-person perspective have higher ITV than imagined representations generated from a third-person perspective (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that implicit and explicit measures of truth differ in their sensitivity to properties underlying truth judgment. We discuss the contribution of characterizing events according to both ITV and ETV to the understanding of various psychological phenomena, such as lying and self-deception.     

Executive control and the experience of regret

The experience of regret rests on a counterfactual analysis of events. Previous research indicates that regret emerges at around 6 years of age, marginally later than the age at which children begin to answer counterfactual questions correctly. We hypothesized that the late emergence of regret relative to early counterfactual thinking is a result of the executive demands of simultaneously holding in mind and comparing dual representations of reality (counterfactual and actual). To test this hypothesis, we administered two regret tasks along with four tests of executive function (two working memory tasks, a switch task, and an inhibition task) to a sample of 104 4- to 7-year-olds. Results indicated that switching, but not working memory or inhibition, was a significant predictor of whether or not children experienced regret. This finding corroborates and extends previous research showing that the development of counterfactual thinking in children is related to their developing executive competence.     

Recognition memory and awareness: A large effect of study-test modalities on “know” responses following a highly perceptual orienting task

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the effects of varying the correspondence between presentation and test modes on states of conscious awareness in recognition memory. Experiment 1 used visual test items and showed that auditory and visual study modes differentially affected recollective experience and feelings of familiarity assessed by “remember” and “know” responses accompanying recognition: “know” responses were slightly enhanced following visual presentation, but this was largely offset by a similarly small increase in “remember” responses. Experiment 2 employed conditions designed to maximise any effect on “know” responses of the correspondence between presentation and test modes by using a highly perceptual orienting task at study. Under these conditions, there was a large mode correspondence effect on “know” responses. The results support the idea that “know” responses are particularly sensitive to perceptual factors.     

Emotion,Decision, and Risk: Betting on Gambles versus Betting on People

We examined the effects of two emotions, fear and anger, on risk‐taking behavior in two types of tasks: Those in which uncertainty is generated by a randomizing device (“lottery risk”) and those in which it is generated by the uncertain behavior of another person (“person‐based risk”). Participants first completed a writing task to induce fear or anger. They then made choices either between lotteries (Experiment 1) or between actions in risky two‐person decisions (Experiments 2 and 3). The experiments involved substantial real‐money payoffs. Replicating earlier studies (which used hypothetical rewards), Experiment 1 showed that fearful participants were more risk‐averse than angry participants in lottery‐risk tasks. However—the key result of this study—fearful participants were substantially less risk‐averse than angry participants in a two‐person task involving person‐based risk (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 offered options and payoffs identical to those of Experiment 2 but with lottery‐type risk. Risk‐taking returned to the pattern of Experiment 1. The impact of incidental emotions on risk‐taking appears to be contingent on the class of uncertainty involved. For lottery risk, fear increased the frequency of risk‐averse choices and anger reduced it. The reverse pattern was found when uncertainty in the decision was person‐based. Further, the effect was specifically on differences in willingness to take risks rather than on differences in judgments of how much risk was present. The impact of different emotions on risk‐taking or risk‐avoiding behavior is thus contingent on the type, as well as the degree, of uncertainty the decision maker faces. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Helping Children Enter Into Another's Experiences: The Look and Feel of It

The role of focusing 4-year-olds' attention on “feeling” or “looking” was examined in three experiments by testing predictions about children's memory for their interactions with an adult partner as they engaged in a collaborative task. Children made collages with an adult partner, and they were later asked to remember who placed the pieces on the collage. Children were more likely to claim they placed pieces actually placed by their partner (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), unless directed to think about how their partner looked when placing the partner's pieces (Experiments 1 and 3). False claims were observed after children were directed to think about how it would “feel” to perform the actions, whether motoric instructions were focused on the self (Experiment 2, N = 48) or partner (Experiment 1, N = 40, and Experiment 3, N = 24). Furthermore, false claims (referred to as I did it errors) were positively associated with accurate collage memory (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that adopting a perspective during encoding that involves “feeling” movements—whether focused on the self or partner—plays an important role in children's memory for collaboration (in this context, memory for contributions made by children or their adult partners to the completion of a collage). A focus on “feeling” may be a way to “enter into” the experiences of another, promoting anticipation and recoding, which may lead to better learning in both collaborative and non-collaborative contexts.     

Influence of outcome valence in the subjective experience of episodic past, future, and counterfactual thinking

Recent findings suggest that our capacity to imagine the future depends on our capacity to remember the past. However, the extent to which episodic memory is involved in our capacity to think about what could have happened in our past, yet did not occur (i.e., episodic counterfactual thinking), remains largely unexplored. The current experiments investigate the phenomenological characteristics and the influence of outcome valence on the experience of past, future and counterfactual thoughts. Participants were asked to mentally simulate past, future, and counterfactual events with positive or negative outcomes. Features of their subjective experiences during each type of simulation were measured using questionnaires and autobiographical interviews. The results suggest that clarity and vividness were higher for past than future and counterfactual simulations. Additionally, emotional intensity was lower for counterfactual simulations than past and future simulations. Finally, outcome valence influenced participants' judgment of probability for future and counterfactual simulations.     

A Place for Every Event and Every Event in Its Place: Memory for Locations and Activities by 4-Year-Old Children

Episodic memories are of specific events and experiences associated with particular times and places. Whereas memory for the temporal aspects of past events has been a focus of research attention, memory for the location in which events were experienced has been less fully investigated. The limited developmental research suggests that preschool-age children, in particular, may have difficulty remembering the location in which they experienced specific events. In 2 experiments, 4-year-old children engaged in 4 unique activities in 4 unique locations in and around a laboratory suite. In Experiment 1, the children had high levels of recall of the activities, the locations, and the conjunctions of activities and locations, implying that they had formed memory representations that featured activities bound in locations. In Experiment 2, we tested whether 1 element of the bound representation—the location of an activity—served as a reliable cue to recall of the other element—the activity itself. The test was positive, providing further evidence that 4-year-old children form mnemonic conjunctions of activities and locations. The results imply that important elements of episodic memory are available to young children.     

The handedness of imagined bodies in action and the role of perspective taking

Past research at the nexus of motor control and perception investigated the role of perspective taking in many behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Some investigators addressed the issue of one's own vs. others' action imagination, but the possible effects of a front or a back view in imagining others' actions have so far been neglected. We report two 'single trial' experiments in which a total of 640 participants were asked to imagine a person performing a manual action - either in a front or in a back view - and then to indicate the hand used by the imagined person during movement execution. In such a task, we assume the existence of two distinct biases: a perceptual-mnemonic bias due to subjects' visual experience of others' actions, encouraging them to imagine right-handed movements, and a motor bias due to subjects' experience of self-made actions, encouraging them to imagine movements performed with the same hand as their dominant hand. We hypothesized that a greater involvement of motor representations in the back view compared to the front view could result in an increased correspondence between one's own manual preference and the hand used by the imagined agent in the former condition. The results of both experiments were consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that while imagining others' actions we employ motor simulations in different degrees according to the perspective adopted.     

How we have fallen: implicit trajectories in collective temporal thought

ABSTRACT

Memory may play a critical role in the ability to imagine events in the future. While most work on this relation has concerned episodic memory and simulated episodic events in the future, the current study examines how collective memories relate to imagination for the collective future. Two thousand American participants provided events for (1) America’s origins, (2) normative events that all Americans should remember, and (3) events in America’s future. Each event was rated for emotional valence. Whereas collective memories – particularly origin events – showed pronounced positivity biases, there was a negativity bias in collective future thought, indicating an implicit trajectory of decline in Americans’ representations of their nation across time. Imagination for the social future may not be simulated based on the template of collective memories, but may rather relate to the past in a way that is mediated by cultural narrative schemata.