The Association of Images

Abstract

The current revival of interest in Imagery marked by the appearance of numerous books and articles suggests something more than a fad. The development of Cognitive Psychology in the last decade has made room for, if it did not require, images as components of cognitive processes. Those writers willing to incorporate images into their theorizing, however, have hastened to ‘apply’ the construct rather than to analyze it and, as presently viewed, images are somehow static ‘parallel’ processes relating to spatial organization of stimuli whereas (see Paivio, 1971) verbal processes are ‘sequential’. Images are considered as responses (conditioned, or otherwise) to stimuli without a dynamic role in sequential thinking. Even when images are described as mediators in paired associate learning they are thought of as bridges between isolated pairs of words rather than as possible bricks forming a continuous road of imagery, or to change the metaphor, as bubbles in a stream of thought. Thus, in the use of mnemonic imagery one might use images to aid recall of a number of words but each response is still an isolated paired-associate. In my use of the “one-bun” technique (Bugelski, 1968) the fact that 10 items could be recalled in their ordinal position did not mean that serial or sequential learning had occurred; rather each item was paired with its own numeral stimulus as a paired-associate unit. Although an image of a bun might have been associated with an image of a battleship, the association presumably stopped there. For the experimental subject to say ‘one-bun’ subvocally, and ‘battleship’ aloud was taken to represent a complete sequence. The image of the battleship was presumed to do no more than to permit the labeling of the image with a word. The fact that an image of a battleship might generate new images in turn, e.g., of sailors, big guns, entire fleets, oceans, etc. was ignored. Such treatment of images as isolated, though mediating reactions, is curious in the light of the popular cybernetic view of words as functioning as both stimuli and responses, and subsequently, stimulus generators (see Saltz, 1971).