Abstract

An experiment was performed to investigate the functional equivalence between mental imagery and perception and to identify the representational features that could be included in mental imagery. In the experiment, subjects were tested with various types of modified versions of common fllusory figures to examine whether illusion could be induced by imagination. For the purpose of experiment, the illusory figures were separated into two different parts, one for the illusion inducing part and another for the to-be-distorted part. Furthermore. the illusion inducing part was modified in such a way that it included only a limited set of dots corresponding to the end points of the illusion inducing features. While the subject was viewing the inducing part and imagining the missing part, the test figure (the to-be-distorted) was briefly flashed and then the subect was asked to judge the length, orientation, or size of the to-be-distorted test elements. All of the subjects participated in the experiment reported their judgements in the direction that might be anticipated with the real illusory figures. Such result was interpreted as an index of a functional equivalence between the imagery and the percept and thus an indication of sharing some common information processing channels by the two structures.