Figurative features and the construction of visual images

The present experiment demonstrated that when subjects were required to form visual images in response to nouns, imagery latencies were shorter to noun's designating primary concepts than to noun’s designating either more abstract or more specific concepts.

Abstract

Within the framework of a featural approach to conceptual representations, "figurative features" were defined as cognitive entities reflecting the sensory properties of objects in the human mind. In conceptual hierarchies such as taxonomies, "primary concepts" were defined as the most abstract concepts which could still be characterized by their richness in figurative features. The present experiment demonstrated that when subjects were required to form visual images in response to nouns, imagery latencies were shorter to nouns designating primary concepts than to nouns designating either more abstract or more specific concepts. Furthermore, when subjects were subsequently presented with a pictured object and were asked to categorize it as illustrating or not the previously designated concept, it took less time to decide that the object corresponded to a primary concept than to either more abstract or more specific concepts. Subjects classified as high imagers had shorter imagery latencies than low imagers to all kinds of nouns, but decision times in the picture-categorization task did not significantly differ in both groups. These data are discussed in reference to current models of mental imagery.