Cognitive-Semantic Concept Structuring in Visual Perception and Visual Imagery: Identifying a New Basic Top-Down Processing System for Visual Experience

What is it about?

While visual perception and visual imagery obviously differ from one another—one involving seeing and the other imagining—they also share basic similarities; for example, we can look along an object both physically with our eyes or mentally with our “mental eyes.” Such similarities allow one (as done in this article) to develop a common account of “visual experience”—of how seeing in visual perception and in visual imagery is structured from a cognitive viewpoint. Using cognitive-semantic analysis, this article basically demonstrates how the content of a visual-perceptual or a visual-imagistic stimulus can be meaningfully characterized as being conceptually organized by what are called Talmyan concept structuring systems. There are four such basic systems and it is shown in this article how these systems structure the seeing of a percept/image 1) in terms of space and time (system configurational structure), 2) in terms of a perspective point (system perspective), 3) in terms of what is put in the center of attention (system attention), and 4) in terms of (possibly also unconscious) imagining what could be done with what is seen (system force dynamics). At the end of the article, the question for future research is formulated, if these four basic Talmyan concept structuring systems are not only able to meaningfully structure the content of visual experience, but possibly the content of all types of sensory experience, such as auditory and tactile experience

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