ABSTRACT
The relations between imagery and classification intrigued us for a number of reasons. Just as classification and categorisation are important—and probably essential—to the management of our world, we contend that imagery is important to classification and categorisation. Imagery seems to offer opportunities to compare and contrast objects, or even ideas, as ways of trying out the “fit” with a category. The most important is that classical models and concepts of classification may be extended to imagery. One is imagery’s introspective nature. Although introspection is notoriously fallible, in the case of imagery reports are often insistently, persistently present. The fits between predictions of the dimensional-sampling model and the data were quite good for the items with irrelevant components for the imagery and verbal strategy groups; they were clearly unacceptable for the perceptual group. Both the similarity and the dimension-sampling models predict that, for pattern integration tests, assignments to a category will increase as a function of the number of lines.
