Jana Holsanova (2005). How we focus our attention in picture viewing, picture description and during mental imagery Invited lecture at the Transregional Collaborative Research Center Spatial Cognition - Reasoning, Action, Interaction at the University of Bremen, Germany, October 21st, 2005. This lecture was transmitted via an interactive video-conference to the University of Freiburg.
We cannot directly uncover the contents of our mind but we can come closer to cognitive processes via overt manifestations. In my talk, I will show how overt verbal and visual protocols can, in concert, elucidate covert mental processes. In the first part, I will present studies on picture viewing and picture description (Holsanova 2001), analysing the dynamics of spatial, semantic and 'mental' grouping. Verbal and visual data have been temporally synchronised and compared in an sequential analysis. With the help of a new analytic format, contents in the focused verbal idea flow and in the visual fixation clusters have been compared, attentional shifts in both types of data tracked and configurations of verbal and visual clusters have been extracted. In the in second part of my talk, I will present studies throwing light on the relation between eye movements and mental imagery (Johansson 2005 et al., forthc.) where we show evidence that eye movements reflect spatial positions of objects while listening to a spoken description, while retelling of a previously heard spoken scene description and while describing a previously seen picture. When analysing attentional shifts in mental image inspection, we differentiate between eye movements that are categorically correct relative to the positions of the whole eye tracking pattern (global correspondence), and eye movements that are only locally correct (local correspondence). The effect is equally strong in retelling from memory, irrespective of whether the original elicitation was spoken or visual. In addition, this effect occurs both while watching a blank white board and while sitting in complete darkness. I will relate our findings to the current debate on mental imagery.