Paper

Statistics of Mental Imagery

Francis Galton

A survey of how vividly people can picture a scene in the mind's eye finds the ability varies enormously between individuals, including scientists who reported almost none at all.

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Where it is now wrong

The method, a questionnaire asking colleagues to introspect on the vividness of their own imagery, is not one a modern study would rely on, and the sample was his own acquaintances. It is read now as the start of individual-differences research, and alongside the eugenic use Galton made of it.

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Groundwork for

Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.

Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional ObjectsRoger N. Shepard & Jacqueline Metzler, 1971The time to judge whether two drawings show the same rotated object rises linearly with the angle between them, showing that a mental image is manipulated as a continuous spatial representation rather than inspected like a static picture.

Filed under Cognitive Psychology in Psychology.