How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 159

building up and adapting patterns of mental images to explain it.
This is an important idea in scientific thought.[why?]
Critics of scientific realism ask how the inner perception of mental
images actually occurs. This is sometimes called the "homunculus
problem" (see also the mind's eye). The problem is similar to asking
how the images you see on a computer screen exist in the memory of
the computer. To scientific materialism, mental images and the
perception of them must be brain-states. According to critics,[who?]
scientific realists cannot explain where the images and their
perceiver exist in the brain. To use the analogy of the computer
screen, these critics argue that cognitive science and psychology has
been unsuccessful in identifying either the component in the brain
(i.e. "hardware") or the mental processes that store these images (i.e.
"software").
10.5 Mental imagery in experimental psychology
Cognitive psychologists and (later) cognitive neuroscientists have
empirically tested some of the philosophical questions related to
whether and how the human brain uses mental imagery in cognition.
One theory of the mind that was examined in these experiments was
the "brain as serial computer" philosophical metaphor of the 1970s.
Psychologist Zenon Pylyshyn theorized that the human mind
processes mental images by decomposing them into an underlying
mathematical proposition. Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler
challenged that view by presenting subjects with 2D line drawings of
groups of 3D block "objects" and asking them to determine whether
that "object" was the same as a second figure, some of which were
rotations of the first "object". Shepard and Metzler proposed that if
we decomposed and then mentally re-imaged the objects into basic
mathematical propositions, as the then-dominant view of cognition
"as a serial digital computer" assumed, then it would be expected
that the time it took to determine whether the object was the same or
not would be independent of how much the object was rotated.
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