Imagine this: A person walks into a room and knocks a ball off a table.
Did you imagine the gender of the person? The color of the ball? The position of the person relative to the ball?
Yes and no, says cognitive scientist Tomer Ullman, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology, who with Halely Balaban recently published a paper titled âThe Capacity Limits of Moving Objects in the Imagination.â If youâre like most people, you probably thought about some of these things, but not others. People build mental imagery hierarchically, starting with the ideas of âperson,â âroom,â âball,â and âtable,â then placing them in relation to one another in space, and only later filling in details like color.
âOur imaginations are actually patchwork and fuzzy and not filled in,â he said. His theory: Your mindâs eye might be lazier than you think. But thatâs not necessarily a bad thing. âYou leave things out until you need them.â
For the latest installment of âOne Word Answer,â we asked Ullman to elaborate further on the current scientific thinking behind âimagination.â
Less like a picture, more like a video game? âOur imaginations are actually patchwork and fuzzy and not filled in,â says Tomer Ullman.