Thinking about a task helps to do it better

“When trained, radiologists are able to detect anomalies on medical images which are extremely hard to detect for untrained people,” says Elisa Tartaglia, of the Laboratory of Psychophysics at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL).

”The results of our study would predict that mental imagery training, hence, repeatedly mentally visualising the anomalies that one wants to detect, would be sufficient to become able to detect them.”

In a series of experiments, participants were told to practise identifying which line, the right or the left in a series of parallel lines, a central line was closest to them and to identify it by pushing the correct button.

In follow-up, ‘post-training’ exercises, these participants improved their baseline performance significantly.

But so did another set of volunteers who, instead of practising with all three lines in training, were instead asked to imagine the bisecting line’s proximity based on an audio tone.

This group also improved their performance significantly in further testing, meaning that “imagery training” was sufficient for perceptual learning, (learning by repeated exposure to a stimulus), says an EPFL release.

The results help illuminate what has been an ongoing puzzle and suggest an overlap in how-and possibly where-mental imagery affects perceptual learning.