Visual Perspective in Mental Imagery

Visual imagery plays a prominent role in mental simulations of past and future events: people tend to “see” events in their mind's eye when they think about them. When picturing events people often use their own first-person perspective, looking out at the situation through their own eyes. However, other times people use a third-person perspective, so that they see themselves in the image from the visual perspective an observer would have. This chapter presents a theoretical model proposing that imagery perspective functions to determine whether people understand events bottom-up, in terms of the phenomenology evoked by concrete features of the pictured situation (first-person), or top-down, in terms of abstractions that integrate the pictured event with its broader context (third-person). This model integrates existing findings and generates novel predictions that challenge widespread assumptions about the function that imagery perspective serves. We review a program of research that supports these predictions, demonstrating the role of imagery perspective in defining the experiential and conceptual facets of the self, determining emotional responses to recalled and imagined life events, and shaping forecasts of future behavior and emotion. We conclude by discussing how the proposed model helps to distinguish the visual dimension of perspective from other dimensions on which perspective may vary. We consider how this model connects with other theories concerning the self and event representation, and we explore the implications for classic and contemporary areas of social psychological inquiry including attribution, social perspective-taking, culture, emotional coping, and top-down versus bottom-up processing.