ABSTRACT
Who would have thought that in the 1980s someone who was trained in the traditional area of experimental psychology would be addressing this audience on something as soft-minded as the “self.” Times, interests, and people change. But do they really change? The “geritol set” of Allan Paivio’s former students can remember, I am sure, attending meetings of the Canadian Psychological Association and the Psychonomic Society in the 60s and receiving polite but restrained interest from fellow researchers when they learned we were studying mental imagery. As we know, mental imagery was a legitimate memory phenomena to the early Greek philosophers and continued to be studied and practiced up to the present century. However, after Watson’s (1913) attack on mentalism and memory images, academic psychology lost interest in this concept. It wasn’t until the 1960s that theorists, such as Hebb (1968), Holt (1964), Mowrer (1960), and Paivio (1969), of course, to mention only a few, showed an interest in a revival of imagery.
