ABSTRACT
Mental imagery has arguably become one of the best understood cognitive functions, despite having been banished for more than 40 years as an object of study by behaviorists. Behaviorists such as John B. Watson (1913) stated that psychology should focus solely on observable stimuli and the responses to these stimuli; according to this view, thinking occurs via subtle movements of the vocal apparatus. Thus, given that mental imagery was accessible only via introspection, the behaviorists rejected it as a suitable subject of scientific study. Mental imagery became a legitimate object of study only after the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and began to re-emerge with the work of Alan Paivio and his students, who showed that imagery can help people to learn verbal material (for an overview, see Paivio, 1971).
