Cog Sci Speaker Series: Vividness and Mental Imagery Research

Presenter: Dr. Douglas Wadle
Title: Vividness and Mental Imagery Research
Abstract: Vividness is a central theoretical construct in recent studies on individual differences in the experience of voluntary mental imagery. Individual differences are largely understood as differences in the vividness of imagery experiences. Nevertheless, there is no broadly agreed upon interpretation of ‘vividness’. Some philosophers have responded by offering analyses of ‘vividness’ that they argue will be useful in mental imagery research. Others argue that the notion should be abandoned. I argue that – as they are currently developed – both responses rely on a view of imagery that is unhelpfully visuo-centric and conceives of visual experience/imagery as unrealistically static and uniformly ‘vivid’ (however construed). This obscures the temporal aspects of imagery as well as the role of attention and working memory in imagery experience. By taking a more realistic look at imagery experiences, I identify previously overlooked dimensions of variation in imagery and refine those that have been noted. The result is a fine-grained set of dimensions for assessing individual differences in mental imagery that improves upon ‘vividness’ and the previous analyses of it. I briefly discuss some in-progress empirical work drawing on these dimensions, with which I am involved. I then turn to the potential benefits of such work for philosophical theorizing about the role of imagery in our mental lives. I conclude by revisiting the prospects for a reductive analysis of ‘vividness’ in terms of these dimensions.
Bio: Douglas Wadle is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at RIT as of this Fall. He specializes in the philosophy of cognitive science, working on topics related to perception, including spatial perception in and across sensory modalities, mental imagery, the individuation of the senses, and the interface between perceptual and linguistic representations. He also works in the philosophy of art, focusing on issues raised by experimental musical practices concerning the definition of music, the ontology of performance works, and evaluations of works and performances. Before turning to philosophy, he worked as a composer and performer of experimental music.