Do we actually have an objective test for the quality of visual imagery? (as compared to subjective quality of it.) What I’m thinking of is something like the mental rotation experiments, proving that in fact there is a representation of images in our heads… but with somewhat more complicated images. Or scenes.
Otherwise… I think I have good imagination abilities (I was also once told so while solving math problems involving rotating cubes), but my subjective quality levels are similar: pictures are somewhat vague, especially compared the ones I can get on 20 hour long bus trips in the middle of the night, half asleep. But isn’t it just about the fact that in half-asleep states, we accept anything as real, even it’s not really representing anything Euclidean?
I remember an online pseudo-IQ test that had an image of an irregular 3D shape with pictographs on it, and then several 2d images of that shape “unfolded” in various different ways, with only one of those unfolded representations being correct and having the right pictographs in the right places at the right rotations.
Does this sound like the kind of test you were asking about?
Mentally visualizing where each side of the shape went when unfolding the shape was important for me in solving those problems, and I think they’d be pretty hard to solve mentally even with intense mastery of abstract algebra.
Do we actually have an objective test for the quality of visual imagery? (as compared to subjective quality of it.) What I’m thinking of is something like the mental rotation experiments, proving that in fact there is a representation of images in our heads… but with somewhat more complicated images. Or scenes.
Otherwise… I think I have good imagination abilities (I was also once told so while solving math problems involving rotating cubes), but my subjective quality levels are similar: pictures are somewhat vague, especially compared the ones I can get on 20 hour long bus trips in the middle of the night, half asleep. But isn’t it just about the fact that in half-asleep states, we accept anything as real, even it’s not really representing anything Euclidean?
I remember an online pseudo-IQ test that had an image of an irregular 3D shape with pictographs on it, and then several 2d images of that shape “unfolded” in various different ways, with only one of those unfolded representations being correct and having the right pictographs in the right places at the right rotations.
Does this sound like the kind of test you were asking about?
Mentally visualizing where each side of the shape went when unfolding the shape was important for me in solving those problems, and I think they’d be pretty hard to solve mentally even with intense mastery of abstract algebra.