Visual Imagery

A salient feature of clinical anxiety and its disorders is an elevated subjective probability judgement that future negative events will happen to the individual. A neglected area of research is the cognitive mechanisms that might underlie this judgement in patient populations. First, we investigated the ease of being able to simulate imaginary negative events happening to the individual ('the simulation heuristic'). Second, we conducted the first investigation to our knowledge into the possible role of visual imagery characteristics on subjective probability for negative events. Twenty-six patients who had a clinical level of anxiety and 26 low-anxiety control participants simulated mentally and also formed visual images of future negative events. They then rated the likelihood of the events happening to them. As predicted, with anxious patients the simulation heuristic was correlated with subjective probability, and they reported increased access to their simulations compared to control participants. The visual image results were more complex: anxious patients' ease of image formation was correlated with subjective probability but did not differ from that of the control participants, and vividness and dismissibility were enhanced in anxious patients but did not correlate with subjective probability. Clinically, helping anxious patients to improve their access to simulations of why events will not happen may help lower their subjective probability. Future research could seek to confirm this experimentally in a clinical intervention study, as well as isolate further the different roles particular visual image characteristics may play in specific aspects of clinical anxiety. Copyright

This paper explores the effectiveness of a specific choice of iconic and verbal stimuli within print advertising to evoke mental imagery. This research aims to further investigate how the evoked imagery influences positive emotions and attitude towards both the advertisement and the brand. We explore how these positive emotions mediate the relationship between mental imagery and subsequent attitudinal responses. Experimental design is employed to examine the effects of imagery-evoking strategies among 340 university students. Structural equation modelling along with the ANOVA and Sobel's test were used in order to investigate the proposed hypotheses. The study's findings indicated that the most effective combination involves an ad containing a staged product image and textual content included instructions to imagine. This combination led to a significant enhancement across all three dimensions of mental imagery: quantity, vividness and elaboration. The findings supported the significant influence of mental imagery in engendering positive emotions and generating favorable attitudes towards the advertised products. Furthermore, the study revealed that positive emotions mediate the relationship between mental imagery and attitude.

There is little consensus on how motor imagery ability should be measured in stroke patients. In particular it is unclear how two methods tapping different aspects of the motor imagery process relate to each other. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between implicit and explicit motor imagery ability by comparing performance of stroke patients and controls on a motor imagery questionnaire and a hand laterality judgment task (HLJT). Sixteen ischemic stroke patients (36 ± 13 weeks post-stroke) and 16 controls, matched by age (51 ± 10 years), gender (7 females) and handedness (3 left-handed), performed a HLJT and completed a motor imagery questionnaire. Our study shows that neither in the healthy controls nor in patients, a correlation is found between the HLJT and the motor imagery questionnaire. Although the patient group scored significantly lower than the control group on the visual motor imagery component (U = 60; p = 0.010) and the kinesthetic motor imagery component (U = 63.5; p = 0.015) of the questionnaire, there were no significant differences between patients and controls on accuracy scores of the HLJT. Analyses of the reaction time profiles of patients and controls showed that patient were still able to use an implicit motor imagery strategy in the HLJT task. Our results show that after stroke performance on tests that measure two different aspects of motor imagery ability, e.g., implicit and explicit motor imagery, can be differently affected. These results articulate the complex relation phenomenological experience and the different components of motor imagery have and caution the use of one tool as an instrument for use in screening, selecting and monitoring stroke patients in rehabilitation settings.

Akhter Ahsen's eidetic theory, particularly his Image-Somatic-Meaning (ISM) model remains one of the most comprehensive phenomenological frameworks for understanding mental imagery developed in the 20th century. Despite its conceptual depth and clinical sophistication, Ahsen's work has been largely overlooked within mainstream cognitive psychology. Over the past four decades, however, cognitive scientists such as Stephen Kosslyn, Emily Holmes, Andrew Mathews, and Joel Pearson have advanced empirical models that converge strikingly with Ahsen's earlier formulations. This paper offers a systematic analysis of the conceptual intersections between Ahsen's eidetic theory and contemporary cognitive imagery research. It argues that many of the "discoveries" now regarded as foundational, such as the depictive nature of imagery, its somatic and affective correlates, its causal influence on cognition, and its therapeutic potential were theoretically formulated and operationally structured by Ahsen decades earlier. Moreover, Ahsen developed a rigorous method for tracing psychopathology through experiential imagery and articulated systematic psychotherapeutic techniques grounded in these principles. This paper is based on an extensive narrative review of the literature, drawing on primary texts by Akhter Ahsen alongside contemporary cognitive, neuroscientific, and clinical research. Relevant sources were identified through structured searches of major academic works, supplemented by targeted cross referencing with historical and theoretical works on imagery science. This approach enabled the identification and synthesis of conceptual convergences, divergences, and overlooked continuities across epistemological, methodological, and clinical domains. The paper concludes by calling for the acknowledgement and reintegration of Ahsen's contributions into the contemporary scientific narrative and proposes a unified framework that bridges phenomenology, clinical science, and cognitive neuroscience.

Where does imagination come from? How did it originate, and which organisms are capable of imagination? What deeper connections does imagination share with consciousness, survival, and the very essence of life? Across both scientific literature and public discourse, imagination is invoked to describe a wide range of phenomena, including artistic creativity, problem solving, symbolic thought, and mental imagery, much like the concept of consciousness, whose interpretation varies across theoretical perspectives. This conceptual breadth motivates the need for a more precise theoretical specification of imagination. In this Perspective, we update and extend prior work that formally specifies imagination as imaginative generativity (IG), a transdisciplinary theoretical construct describing the generative process through which organisms produce novel multisensory imaginings. Through IG, organisms can anticipate potential changes and challenges in their environments and guide internally guided actions. This generative capacity supports adaptive behavior that may extend beyond immediate individual survival to influence species-level development. The formal extension developed in this paper involves identifying the functional characteristics that distinguish imaginative/IG processes from related representational mechanisms such as vivid representing and mental imagery. Relative to our previous IG formulation, the present paper makes three specific contributions: it clarifies the distinction between vivid representing (VR) and imaginative generativity (IG), situates that distinction within an evolutionary and archaeological account of representational change, and uses contemporary AI systems as comparative cases for identifying restricted functional analogues of IG in the absence of reflective, self-awareness. The synthesis we offer uses the language of epistemology as an organizing infrastructure for the development of transdisciplinary theory. While imagination is intuitive, its study demands careful dismantling and re-examination of the underlying assumptions and grounding. Precedents for this methodology exist within psychology and consciousness studies; however, we additionally offer an integrative review to garner supporting evidence across neuroscience, biology, and cognitive science to refine contemporary understanding of imaginative processes and their relationship to cognition and consciousness.

you for supporting me by doing more work than a mom should ever have to do. I would not have accomplished this goal without you! Thank you, Sarah, my five-year-old daughter, who while setting the table for dinner one night, gave me the idea of how a child may use imagery to perform such a task. Sarah always kept my research in perspective with her many questions such as whether the -story‖ I was writing had anything to do with the -game‖ I made, and whether or not I was going to talk about it at -show-and-tell‖. To Stephanie, my two-year old daughter, who despite instructions not to enter the study when the door was closed, entered anyway, ran to me, and give me a big hug. Those moments are precious and always brightened my day even when I had not accomplished much. Sarah and Stephanie's games of -hide-and-go-seek‖ also inspired some of my thoughts. To my parents, thanks for always encouraging me to -climb the next mountain‖, work hard, and persevere. A special thanks to my advisor, John Laird, who helped cultivate these research ideas and then provided me with the latitude to develop them. As a -nontraditional‖ graduate student, John respected my professional background and kept me on track by encouraging me to focus on the most important ideas, start simple, and always evaluate. To my committee members, George Furnas, Rick Lewis, and Thad Polk, thank you for encouraging me to think about depictive representations (George) and to consider the psychological and neurological constraints (Rick and Thad). I enjoyed the discussions and learned a lot at the biologically inspired cognitive architecture (BICA) meetings. I appreciate my fellow Soar graduate students--Andy, Bob, Jakub, Joseph, Nate, Nick, and YJ--for the friendship, stimulating discussions, and letting an -old guy‖ hang around the research lab. Computational Constraints Functional Capability Computational Efficiency Problem-Solving Quality -Functional Constraints Behavioral and Biological Constraints Tasks and Environments * *

This study is an extract from a thesis presented by A. D. in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree from Northeastern University. Portions of this paper were presented at the sixty-ninth annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston. We thank Derek Jensen and Sarah Jones for help with the collection of the data. A. D. is grateful to Sean Allen for programming assistance. Finally, we thank

A salient feature of clinical anxiety and its disorders is an elevated subjective probability judgement that future negative events will happen to the individual. A neglected area of research is the cognitive mechanisms that might underlie this judgement in patient populations. First, we investigated the ease of being able to simulate imaginary negative events happening to the individual ('the simulation heuristic'). Second, we conducted the first investigation to our knowledge into the possible role of visual imagery characteristics on subjective probability for negative events. Twenty-six patients who had a clinical level of anxiety and 26 low-anxiety control participants simulated mentally and also formed visual images of future negative events. They then rated the likelihood of the events happening to them. As predicted, with anxious patients the simulation heuristic was correlated with subjective probability, and they reported increased access to their simulations compared to control participants. The visual image results were more complex: anxious patients' ease of image formation was correlated with subjective probability but did not differ from that of the control participants, and vividness and dismissibility were enhanced in anxious patients but did not correlate with subjective probability. Clinically, helping anxious patients to improve their access to simulations of why events will not happen may help lower their subjective probability. Future research could seek to confirm this experimentally in a clinical intervention study, as well as isolate further the different roles particular visual image characteristics may play in specific aspects of clinical anxiety. Copyright

Lighting design process consists in the laying down of luminances over shapes, surfaces, colours, and volumes, quite in a similar way painters lay down “shadow” and “light” on their canvas. It may also be described as the building up of a meaningful architectural visual situation that, through lighting, assumes its perceptual function in accordance with Richard Williams when he dedicates the question of the visual communication of the architectural intent” to the user he defines as “a non specialized population”.
Talking about the “architectural intent” we have already scoured this notion through William MC Lam analysis when he defines lighting’s fundamental role in the architecture’s perceptual construction, for it assigns a supplement of meaning to the environment, and informs the anticipation of our moving within the architecture, for emotional, and functional purpose.
Rudolf Arnheim, on his side, describes the processes that makes up a pertinent image, in terms of attention catching, by the taking in consideration of the visual dynamic, of the movement and the shape, in the perceptual exercise of “the experiencing of the visual forces”, in our case those of the architecture, of the light as an energy and a shape provider, and of the impact of the message along the path of our scouring of the environment. The combination of these notions leads to what we have chosen to define as the “right image”, the one delivered by the lighting project in the final phase of the architectural one in the very moment of its acceptation by the customer. The acceptation protocol according to technical and functional expectations inventoried in a specification booklet, is inseparable of an emotional judgement. This final aesthetical statement, as subtle it might be, is in facts tacitly recognized as the definitive demonstration and guarantee of the whole coherence of the project. It is symbolic of the congruency of the visual protocol.
On the contrary, any aesthetically incongruous result, will leave the customer’s “beholder’s mind” in a state of uncertainty, of an unachieved expectation path, and devaluate the single idea of the lighting design project in some feeling of a betrayal. This perceptual synthesis collimates with the idea of the “symbolic form” as it meets the etymological definition of the “symbol”, in the opposition between the “Syn-Ballon” (συμβάλλω) as a contract, a visually sealed one, as a countermark offered to the customer’s expectations in order to bring them together, and the “Dia-ballon” (διαβάλλω): its breakdown. It also corroborates Plato and Aristotle’s illustrations on this topic, as much as the visual expectations quoted by W. M.C. Lam
The displaying of the various lighting and colour scenes as symbols opens on a pedagogical description of the creative construction of the lighting design and of the colour project. In the meantime it might find a convergence with the already exposed topic of the “Semiotic of light”.

Begrenzungen und Entgrenzungen von Bildern" befasst sich mit einer neuen Archäologie der Bilder aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Die erste Konferenz steht im Zeichen der Konfiguration des Bildlichen und der Frage "Was und wie sind Bilder?". Zur Annäherung an das Thema sollen durch Beiträge der verschiedenen, beteiligten Disziplinen drei Perspektiven beleuchtet werden. Zum einen soll nach den modernen (etischen) Bildbegriffen und deren Verwendung gefragt werden, zweitens die emischen, mithin historischen Bildbegriffe der verschiedenen frühen Bildkulturen beleuchtet und zuletzt wie Bildlichkeit im Vollzug, performativ und kommunikativ, hergestellt wird.

Blindsight presents a striking dissociation: individuals with damage to primary visual cortex can respond accurately to visual stimuli while reporting no conscious visual experience. This phenomenon is often taken to show that perception and action do not require consciousness. While this conclusion is correct, it leaves unresolved a deeper question: what functional role does conscious awareness play if accurate perception and behavior can occur without it? This paper argues that blindsight reveals the primary function of consciousness not as perception or control, but as feedback integration for memory formation, visualization, and adaptive generalization across time. Drawing on the Subconscious-First Consciousness (SF-C) framework and a temporal envelope account of experience, we show that blindsight preserves execution while disabling evaluative and imagistic integration. We further argue that blindsight belongs to a broader class of phenomena-including aphantasia-in which information remains functionally effective at the subconscious level while failing to enter conscious experience. Together, these cases demonstrate why consciousness exists at all: not to make perception possible, but to allow systems to experience, remember, and learn from their own activity over time.

We introduce virtual reality (VR) technology for oral communication practice in a college public-speaking class through a semester-long activity that offers students immersive, low-stakes opportunities for speech rehearsal. Students used the VirtualSpeech platform to complete four practice sessions. Instructors may find that offering VR as one of several rehearsal options alongside more traditional practice venues can enhance student confidence and support student preparation. Courses: The activity was designed for public-speaking courses; however, it is also well suited for other courses with speakingintensive designations or oral communication intensive units, assignments, or speeches, such as Argumentation, Interpersonal Communication, and Small Group Communication. Objectives: Participation in this activity is designed to enhance student speech preparedness by (1) supporting diversified opportunities for students to practice speaking out of the classroom, (2) providing targeted feedback, and (3) reducing potential for student communication apprehension.

This study examines the efficacy of integrating virtual reality (VR) as a tool for enhancing speaking competencies in the public speaking course. Specifically, we explore how VR speech rehearsals, targeted feedback, and safe exposure to speaking opportunities impact student self-efficacy. Over the course of a semester, students enrolled in the public speaking course completed three structured VR practice sessions and a series of corresponding questionnaires with open and closed-ended items. Our results indicate that most students found the scaffolded VR practice sessions beneficial in enhancing self-efficacy, including an enhanced sense of preparedness, and a smaller set of students found VR practice sessions helped reduce communication apprehension. Student feedback offered theoretical and practical understanding for best practices to effectively motivate student participation and integrate VR into the public speaking course. While VR shows promise as a complementary tool for enhancing oral communication skills, it is not a substitute for classroom instruction or in-person tutoring. We conclude by offering directions for further research into the uses and limitations of VR in oral communication pedagogy.

We present new results from our most recent efforts in applying XCS to automatic target recognition (ATR). We place particular emphasis on ATR as a series of linked problems, which include pre-processing of multi-spectral data, detection of objects (in this case, vehicles) in that data, and identification (classification) of those objects. Multi-spectral data contains visual imagery, and additional imagery from several infrared spectral bands. The performance of XCS, with robust features, notably exceeds that of a template-based classifier on the pre-processed multi-spectral data for vehicle identification.

The article examines Kendrick Lamar's 2025 Super Bowl LIX halftime performance as a cultural intervention that uses cultural symbolism, choreography, and collaboration to critique systemic racism and reclaim Black agency on a global stage. The article situates the performance within a lineage of Black protest music and visual art using close readings of choreography, costume and flag imagery, vocal arrangement, and cameo appearances (Douglas 2015; Combs 2020; Hammons 1990; Martiel 2017). I argue that the show stages a set of coordinated visual and embodied practices that transform the flag from an emblem of unexamined unity into a contested archive of racial labor and sacrifice. The presentation foregrounds wounded and resistant bodies, deploys the stadium as a pedagogical space, and recenters Black feminine labor through a voice-centered offering of SZA that resists industry norms of hypersexualization (Gómez 2023; Gross 2024). Serena Williams's dance further extends this reclamation by linking athletic performance to cultural sovereignty (Collins 2023). The performance, therefore, operates simultaneously as testimony, aesthetic protest, and public pedagogy, demonstrating that mass broadcast spectacle can function as an archival and didactic medium for racial critique. The article finds that the performance functions as testimony, protest, and pedagogy, transforming national symbols and mass spectacle into vehicles for cultural resistance, memory, and collective empowerment.

IMAGERY-IMMAGINAZIONE MOTORIA Cos'è, quali evidenze scientifiche la supportano e come orientare l'allenamento e la riabilitazione L'imagery, o immaginazione motoria, è la capacità di rappresentare mentalmente un'azione senza eseguirla fisicamente. Non si tratta di fantasia generica, ma di una simulazione interna in cui il cervello "prepara" e "prova" un gesto motorio come se stesse per compierlo, con un coinvolgimento reale delle reti neurali deputate al movimento.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of imagery training on the 400-m sprint at the university level. The current study was conducted on the 49 sprinters based on their participation at university level competitions from the year 2013-2017. The age of sprinters was ranged from 18-25 years. Sports imagery ability questionnaire’ [1] was used to measure the imagery ability and completion time of 400-m sprint was noted. To analyze the effect of imagery training a paired sample t-test was employed at P

This paper investigates how Pakistani television advertisements employ linguistic strategies to target distinct social classes. Using Fairclough's three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (textual, discursive, and social practice), a purposive sample of ads aimed at upper-, middle-, and lower-class audiences was examined. Textual analysis revealed that luxury brands use sophisticated, aspirational language that foregrounds exclusivity and elite identity; middle-class ads mix cultural familiarity with aspirational cues that emphasize value, quality, and upward mobility; and lower-class ads rely on straightforward, pragmatic diction that highlights affordability and everyday functionality. Discursive practice shows how these linguistic choices engage audiences and reinforce prevailing cultural scripts, while the social-practice dimension uncovers the ways in which advertisers reproduce and

We address three types of model of the relationship between working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM): (a) the gateway model, in which WM acts as a gateway between perceptual input and LTM; (b) the unitary model, in which WM is seen as the currently activated areas of LTM; and (c) the workspace model, in which perceptual input activates LTM, and WM acts as a separate workspace for processing and temporary retention of these activated traces. Predictions of these models were tested, focusing on visuospatial working memory and using dual-task methodology to combine two main tasks (visual short-term retention and image generation) with two interference tasks (irrelevant pictures and spatial tapping). The pictures selectively disrupted performance on the generation task, whereas the tapping selectively interfered with the retention task. Results are consistent with the predictions of the workspace model.

Every human being should be treated equally in education opportunities regardless of their backgrounds including disabled peoples. This study focuses on the enhancing learning ability among deaf students by using visual images as an alternative method of teaching and learning. Problem occurs when deaf students is taught by using the traditional method of learning activities which is ended up students lost their concentration in learning activities cause them to fail to obtain good grade. The objectives are to identify the current practice in teaching and learning among deaf students, and to analyse the impact of using visual images as an alternative method. Interviews and observations are used in data collection. The findings indicated that the deaf students are interested in learning activities by using pictures and gestures of body movement. It is concluded that interactive media is fundamental as an alternative method in enhancing learning ability for deaf students.

In the present age of digital impersonation, biometric techniques are proved to be the best method to protect against identity thefts. In Biometric technologies Iris recognition is a proved to be most accurate means to identify people. Iris is regarded as the most reliable biometric feature in terms of its uniqueness and robustness .For Iris Recognition iris images from different person should be stored in the data base & called whenever required. So there is need for a large database of iris images is required. If available storage space is not enough for storing these images, compression will be a solution. Compression allows reduction in the space needed to store these iris images & also important when transferring these images through internet. The objective of this paper is to present the effects of image compression on the iris recognition performance. Normally, standard iris images are 600 times larger than the Iris Code templates which required larger space for storage .It i...

The rapid advancements in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence has led to the emergence of technologies like the Brain Computer Interface (BCI), which has revolutionized rehabilitation protocols. However, given the neural basis of BCIs and the dependence of its performance on cognitive factors, BCIs may be used to characterize the functional capacity of the user. A resting state segment can also be considered for characterization of the functional network integrity, creating a two part framework that probes the functional networks and their cognitive manifestations. This thesis explores such a two part framework using a simultaneous EEG-fMRI setup on a healthy population. The BCI accuracies for all subjects increased over the course of the scan and is thought to be due to learning processes on the subject's part. Since such learning processes require cognitive faculties such as attention and working memory, these factors might modulate the BCI performance profile, making it a potential metric for the integrity of such cognitive factors. The resting state analysis identified four EEG Microstates that have been previously found to be associated with verbal, visual, saliency and attention reorientation tasks. The proportion of each microstate that composed the corresponding fMRI resting state networks (RSN) were identified, opening up the potential for predicting fMRI-based RSN information, from EEG microstates alone. The developed protocol can be used to diagnose potential • VEP -Visual Evoked Potentials • VSDI -Voltage Sensitive Dye Imaging • WT -Wavelet Transform x

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This paper describes a system for automated chess playing with a robot manipulator. Customized chess engine is used to implement chess rules, to evaluate the board position during the game and to compute the next move of the robot using the alpha-beta search algorithm. This work contributes to the recent trends for creating automated robotic games and introduction of non-standard human-computer interfaces.