Now: what color was that triangle? How many centimeters across was the base? Was it a solid, or a line enclosing an area, and if the latter how thick was the line? Did it have a matte finish, or glossy? Was it opaque, transparent, or translucent? If opaque, did it cast a shadow? Where was the light source, and how tall was the triangle, and what was the color of the light… for example, was the shadow cool or warm?
Most people’s imagined triangles simply won’t have those visual properties, even though triangles they actually see do have those properties, because imagination isn’t a matter of re-presenting things to our visual systems. It’s something else, though it has aspects of that.
You might be generalizing from one example. There are plenty of games asking people to imagine (say) a cube, then asking them about various properties of the cube, and then purporting to relate them to features of the subject’s personality, and I can recall very few people answering “I don’t know” to any such question.
I’m confident I’m not generalizing from one example, though I might certainly be overestimating the relevance of my sample.
To be a little more concrete, I would be very surprised if it turned out that more than, say, 10% of the population honestly included all of those elements, or even most of them, in their imagined triangle if instructed to imagine a triangle. Do you think I’m overconfident about that?
How many of those elements did you include in your triangle, before being prompted by the questions?
How many of those elements did you include in your triangle, before being prompted by the questions?
I’m not sure you can generally answer that by introspection. At least in my case, when prompted by the question I remember having seen the specific detail. However knowing how the mind works, I also assign high probability to the explanation that my mind filled in the requested detail when prompted—rewriting my memory, loosely speaking. This is, I believe, the same phenomenon that makes eyewitness testimony so unreliable.
I agree completely, but it’s socially conventional to ask people questions about our past experiences as though we were a definitive source of information about it.
“Very few” /= “none.” People seem to vary widely in their visualization abilities. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that they could vary in their auditory imagination, but now that TheOtherDave reports his experience, I feel like I should have expected it.
You might be generalizing from one example. There are plenty of games asking people to imagine (say) a cube, then asking them about various properties of the cube, and then purporting to relate them to features of the subject’s personality, and I can recall very few people answering “I don’t know” to any such question.
I’m confident I’m not generalizing from one example, though I might certainly be overestimating the relevance of my sample.
To be a little more concrete, I would be very surprised if it turned out that more than, say, 10% of the population honestly included all of those elements, or even most of them, in their imagined triangle if instructed to imagine a triangle. Do you think I’m overconfident about that?
How many of those elements did you include in your triangle, before being prompted by the questions?
I’m not sure you can generally answer that by introspection. At least in my case, when prompted by the question I remember having seen the specific detail. However knowing how the mind works, I also assign high probability to the explanation that my mind filled in the requested detail when prompted—rewriting my memory, loosely speaking. This is, I believe, the same phenomenon that makes eyewitness testimony so unreliable.
I agree completely, but it’s socially conventional to ask people questions about our past experiences as though we were a definitive source of information about it.
“Very few” /= “none.” People seem to vary widely in their visualization abilities. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that they could vary in their auditory imagination, but now that TheOtherDave reports his experience, I feel like I should have expected it.