Why is Imagery a Powerful Strategy?

• People have accurate memory for visual information.
• Memory for pictorial material is superior to memory for verbal material.
• Images may be relatively enduring.
• Individuals store images in several modalities (visual, auditory, olfactory).

Ancient Conception of Imagery: Aristotle

• The concept of the imagination (mental image) seems to have been introduced by Aristotle.
• "The soul never thinks without a mental image."
• Chinese proverb: "One picture is worth ten thousand words."
• Could Einstein's impressive insight have come from visual images he conjured up intuitively then translated into the language of mathematics?
• It was recently shown that the inferior parietal lobe of Albert Einstein's brain was 15% wider than normal.
• Visuospatial cognition, mathematical thought and imagery of movement are dependent on this region.

Imagery

• may be used to process many kinds of material for many purposes.
• Not bound by the structure of the knowledge domain: Aids recall of high or low structure information.
• For declarative, conditional and procedural knowledge.
• Not restricted to verbal material.
• Encoding systems in the mind are verbal and imaginal.