On the other hand, converging evidence from several different types of experiment seems to have been enough to establish a consensus amongst most cognitive scientists that the processes of mental scanning, mental rotation, and the size effects in image inspection are real and significant components of cognition.
What the program actually does is construct and display a picture on the computer's screen, on the basis of a stored file, and then move it about on the screen in various ways, in order to model some of the ways in which people can supposedly manipulate their mental images (such as in mental rotation and mental scanning).
After all, as Jolicoeur & Kosslyn (1985) point out, the mental scanning effect demonstrated by Kosslyn, Ball & Reiser (1978) (i.e., a linear relationship between the distance scanned over an image and the time taken) was still apparent in Intons-Peterson's findings, quite regardless of her experimenters' expectations about image versus perceptual conditions.
In fact, Pylyshyn's actual, subsequently published, account of mental scanning, for example (Pylyshyn, 1981, 2002a), does not resemble the straw-man set up by Kosslyn & Pomerantz in the least; neither, so far as I am aware, has any other theorist ever seriously defended anything remotely resembling it.
After Doctor McCoy conducts a series of mental scans, the crew of the ShiKahr realise that history has been altered.
Mental scanning has been demonstrated in congenitally blind participants, although reported scanning times are shorter in duration in comparison to sighted groups (Iachini & Ruggiero, 2010).
Mental scanning tasks have revealed significant deficits in image inspection related to aging (Brown, Kosslyn, & Dror, 1998) and blindness (Iachini & Ruggiero, 2010).
One of the most widely researched aspects of image inspection is mental scanning during which the focus of attention in an image is shifted from one point to another.
What you are doing more or less, is a kind of mental CT scan of your body.
But how does this process ensure that the output (the representation of the scanned mental state) matches the input (the scanned state itself)?
