Cognitive psychologists suggest that we use mental representations to represent
our knowledge, memories, or ideas in order to store and maintain our mental
processes. Mental representation is defined as a structure in our mind, such as
an idea or image. That stands for something else. Such that an external object,
or things that was sensed in the past or future. But whatever it is, it's not
something in the present. These mental representations, allow us to think about
things that are abstract, and have no physical existence. Earlier in this
lesson when we talked about language, we asked about love and passion. We can
also include things such as truth or justice, as abstract ideas that we can
represent in our mind visually and verbally. So visual imagery involves visual
representations created by the brain after the original stimulus is no longer
present. Now if you recall, the visual system is mostly located in the
occipital occipital lobes. One interesting thing to note is that while we're
visualizing something, our brain is active in much of the same ways it is
during visual perception. That is, visual imagery has similar brain activity to
visual perception. In fact, because of this, if you imagine doing your very
best at a task, it may actually help you improve in your performance. Sports
psychologists are aware of this, and use visualization techniques to help
improve athlete's performance. Researchers have noted that both visual
imagination and visual imagery are the most important to many creative
accomplishments, both in science and in art.
