ABSTRACT
Imagination has always been a critical part of human playfulness, learning and adaptation. Until relatively recently, nineteenth century scientific paradigms and technical metaphors influenced the ways in which people thought about the dynamics of imagination and human responses to the environment. For example, visualisation was understood scientifically in terms similar to the actions of a camera-the eye creating images of the object of focus (Metzler & Shepherd, 1974; Kosslyn & Pomerantz, 1997) which were subsequently stored and processed-with imagination integral to the process. After attempts to replicate these processes with computers, the limits of these kinds of models of human activity are now being recognised. Researchers now acknowledge the complex and interactive nature of the human imagination, and the ways in which all sensory information is interpreted and reinterpreted through an ever-changing lens of expectations, culturally acquired knowledge, and emotion-laden associations with experiences, people and places (Kosslyn, 1996).
