A mental image is like herding cats (or kids)

Abstract

My research tries to tackle how we construct mental images. To that end, I measure peoples eye movements while they maintain a mental image. By including the temporal dynamics into the spatial analysis, I can show that the word „maintain“ is just about right. Maintaining a mental image is similar to maintaining several children unhurt, dry and reasonably clean: Spend some time at one spot fixing its content or attending its needs while the state of the others decreases over time (other parts of the mental image fade away, other children decide to water the plants). Dart to the next spot, fix it and so on. Thus, by looking at the temporal dynamics of the eye movements we can infer how demanding a mental image is to handle and by manipulating the type of mental image, we can infer what it actually takes to maintain it.