The Spontaneous Occurrence of Mental Visualization in Thinking

Undergraduates were asked to rate how frequently they experienced visual images in a wide set of everyday-life situations. Results showed that imagery often occurs in undirected thinking, such as in daydreaming, or when external stimuli elicit automatically a visual representation; conversely, images are seldom reported in goal-oriented thinking, such as memorizing, judging, problem-solving, planning, and decision-making. Further, the most frequent images refers to spatial representations or to single, static, concrete elements; images about more complex, dynamic, and abstract contents are less frequent. The use of mental visualization is affected selectively by gender and by the course of study attended. Finally, factor analysis stressed the distinction between stimulus-elicited and fantasy images and images used intentionally in cognitive tasks. Findings suggested that in common-life reasoning individuals do not take advantage of the properties of imagery supported by experiments about the cognitive functions of visualization.