Is it all in the Mind? Imagery, reading, and learning

Supervisor: Dr Sebastian Suggate

A) Rationale for the project

Mental images - how we re-experience and simulate the world internally, in the absence of external stimuli - have been long thought to be fundamentals of human experience. Indeed, many people argue that problem solving and thinking involves imagining the problem from different perspectives. Similarly, when we read texts, many people report experiencing images of what they read, some say that reading for them is like “watching a film in their heads”. However, others, such as those with a condition known as aphantasia, claim to experience no (conscious) imagery. In fact, we know very little about our inner worlds of mental images, such as whether these are purely visual and auditory or whether these can exist for the other five or six senses we have. We know very little about how imagery relates to learning, reading, and reading comprehension in children and adults. Both quantitative and qualitative work is sorely needed to tackle the many outstanding questions for different groups of learners and different ages.

B) References that should be read

Isaac, A. R., & Marks, D. F. (1994). Individual differences in mental imagery experience: Developmental changes and specialization. British Journal of Psychology , 85(4), 479–500.

Suggate, Sebastian, & Lenhard, W. (2022). Mental imagery skill predicts adults’ reading performance. Learning and Instruction, 80(101633), 101633.

Suggate, Sebastian P., & Martzog, P. (2020). Screen-time influences children’s mental imagery performance. Developmental Science, 23(6), e12978.

Zeman, A., Dewar, M., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery - Congenital aphantasia. Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior, 73, 378–380.

C) Research aims and questions

Questions can cover any aspect of mental imagery, such as how to measure mental imagery, how mental imagery is experienced by different people, the different sensory modalities involved in mental imagery, aphantasia, imagery and reading/mathematics/language, imagery and how it is affected by digital media.

D) Methods

Good scientific practice dictates that the methodology should arise out of the research question (not the other way around), however, methods I am comfortable supervising include studies in educational settings, experiments, interventions, longitudinal/cross sectional studies, online studies, interviews, literature reviews and meta-analyses.