Visual and Temporal Abduction

Abstract

The general objective is to consider how the use of visual mental imagery in thinking may be relevant to hypothesis generation and scientific discovery. To this end I treat imagery as a problem-solving paradigm in artificial intelligence and illustrate some related cognitive models. In this research area the term “image” refers to an internal representation used by humans to retrieve information from memory. Many psychological and physiological studies have been carried out to describe the multiple functions of mental imagery processes: there exists a visual memory (Paivio, 1975) that is superior in recall; humans typically use mental imagery for spatial reasoning (Farah, 1988); images can be rebuilt in creative ways (Finke, and Slayton, 1988); they preserve the spatial relationships, relative sizes, and relative distances of real physical objects (Kosslyn, 1980); for a more complete list, see Tye (1991).