Imagine that-Professor Jim Davies is researching the complexities of the human imagination

By Marissa Kemp

As children, we are always told to use our imaginations. As we grow older though, very few of us think about what our imagination entails. Carleton University cognitive science professor Jim Davies has made it his challenge to figure out how the imagination works. Davies studies how our imaginations place objects in imagined scenes, even though many of those objects are not in the original suggestion. For example, if you are asked to imagine a “dog,” you might also imagine a collar.

His research focuses on the images that people can create with their imagination. He questions how people create an image when given a topic, knowing which objects to include and where the objects go in the actual image. He suggests that our capability to imagine an image is related to our visual memory. That is, we imagine things as we see them in real life. For example, when picturing someone walking a dog, the dog is generally standing upright on the ground potentially attached to a leash. We very rarely picture the dog upside down or floating in the air because we do not experience that in reality.

The human imagination can be studied through different techniques. One can describe the image that they have created or draw what they have imagined. Eye tracking technology and reaction time testing are also used to understand how people imagine and where they place objects in the image. Davies is also working to create computer programs that imagine the same way people do. He has a computer program that uses over fifty thousand labelled images, and finds the probabilities of what other objects will appear with a particular query object. This program allows us to better understand the relationship between things that we connect in our imaginations.

This study is funded by NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) and undergraduate and graduate students alike work with Davies in the labs to better understand the human imagination.