The functional role of mental images and of visual-spatial representations in memory has been documented since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, the properties of visual-spatial representations and the mechanisms by which they mediate memory performance have been elucidated only recently, by research in cognitive psychology. One of the central conclusions of this review is that visual-spatial representations provide a varied and flexible format for coding information about the world in memory. Moreover, such representations are used to accomplish many cognitive activities. The nature of the information accessed from objects mental images is different from the nature of the visual information represented in memory for purposes of individual object recognition and from information preserved in representations of spatial layouts.
mental images; visual-spatial representations of objects and of layouts