The Process of Thinking: Mental Imagery and Propositions

Every time you plan your commute, picture a friend’s face, or debate whether a recipe needs more salt, something extraordinary is happening inside your head. You’re not just reacting to the world – you’re mentally representing it. This ability to build, hold, and manipulate internal representations is the heart of what psychologists call thinking. Two of its most important building blocks are mental imagery and propositions, and together they explain a great deal about how we solve problems, make decisions, and imagine things that don’t yet exist.

What thinking really means 🔗

In psychology, thinking is treated as a higher-order mental process. It goes beyond simply sensing the world; it involves manipulating information, forming concepts, reasoning through problems, and reflecting on what we already know. The American Psychological Association describes cognition as the processes of knowing – including attending, remembering, and reasoning – and thinking sits right at the centre of this cluster.

Thinking is essentially internal representation. Instead of physically acting on the environment every time we need to make a decision, we construct a mental model of it and experiment with that model first. This is why a chess player can consider three moves ahead without touching a piece, or why a student can plan an entire essay before writing a single sentence.

The major types of thinking 🔗

Psychologists usually group thinking into several overlapping categories. Each one serves a slightly different purpose and pulls on different cognitive skills.

Perceptual thinking 🔗

This is the most basic form. Perceptual thinking deals with concrete objects and events we can actually see, hear, or touch. A toddler arranging blocks by size, or a shopper comparing two mangoes for ripeness, is engaged in perceptual thinking. Because it is tied directly to sensory experience, it is sometimes called concrete thinking, and children develop it long before they can handle abstract ideas.

Conceptual thinking 🔗

Conceptual thinking – also known as abstract thinking – uses concepts, symbols, and language rather than immediate sensory input. It allows us to think about justice, democracy, inflation, or gravity, none of which we can touch. According to psychology educators, this form of thought is considered superior to perceptual thinking because it economises effort in understanding and problem-solving. Rather than handling every mango individually, we can reason about “fruit quality” as a general category.

Reflective thinking 🔗

Reflective thinking was famously described by the American philosopher John Dewey. It is goal-directed and logical, drawing on past experiences to make sense of present problems. Dewey argued that this form of careful, evidence-based thought is the essence of the scientific approach, and modern educators still point out that critical or reflective thinking begins with wanting to solve a problem. When a doctor reviews a patient’s history before prescribing treatment, she is thinking reflectively.

Creative thinking 🔗

Creative thinking is the ability to produce novel, original, or unusual ideas. It doesn’t appear out of thin air; most psychologists describe it as a four-stage process: preparation (gathering information), incubation (letting ideas simmer unconsciously), illumination (the “aha” moment), and verification (testing whether the idea actually works). Scientists developing a new vaccine and poets crafting an original metaphor both rely on this mode of thought.

Critical thinking 🔗

Critical thinking is the disciplined evaluation of information and arguments. It involves conceptualisation, interpretation, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation to reach unbiased, reasoned judgements. A juror weighing witness testimony, a researcher scrutinising a study’s methodology, or a citizen deciding whether a forwarded WhatsApp message is credible – all are exercising critical thinking. It is a skill that formal education increasingly tries to nurture, and the National Education Policy 2020 explicitly emphasises critical thinking and scientific temper as core goals of learning.

Mental imagery: thinking in pictures 🔗

One of the most fascinating components of thinking is mental imagery – the ability to create quasi-perceptual representations in the absence of the actual stimulus. Close your eyes and picture your childhood bedroom. You can likely “see” the door, the window, and where your bed stood. That sensation is mental imagery at work.

Philosophers have been curious about this capacity for centuries. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces the idea of the “mind’s eye” back to Cicero, and notes that philosophers from Berkeley and Hume to James understood many ideas as mental images. Modern neuroscience has since taken the concept seriously, showing that imagery activates many of the same brain regions as actual perception.

How researchers study imagery 🔗

Two landmark experiments shaped what we know today.

In 1971, Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler asked participants to look at pairs of three-dimensional block figures and decide whether the two were identical (just rotated) or mirror images. The striking finding, reported in the journal Science, was that the greater the angular difference between the figures, the longer participants took to respond – as if they were literally rotating the object in their heads at a roughly constant speed. This suggested that mental images behave like physical ones, preserving spatial properties.

A few years later, Stephen Kosslyn ran his famous “map scanning” studies. Participants memorised a fictional island with several landmarks and were then asked to mentally “travel” from one landmark to another. The further apart the two landmarks were on the imagined map, the longer it took. Kosslyn argued this showed that mental images preserve metric spatial information, much like real pictures.

Why mental imagery matters 🔗

Mental imagery is not a party trick; it has real cognitive payoff. It helps in problem-solving – visualising the layout of a new kitchen before buying furniture. It boosts memory, which is why mnemonic techniques work. Athletes use imagery in training, rehearsing a penalty kick or a dive before executing it. Clinicians have also found imagery to be central to conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, where intrusive emotional mental imagery causes distress across a range of psychiatric disorders, making it an important target for therapy.

Interestingly, not everyone experiences imagery the same way. Some people report extremely vivid inner pictures, while others – a condition called aphantasia – report no visual imagery at all and still think perfectly well. This variation has shaped a long-running scientific debate about what imagery actually is.

Propositions: thinking in abstract statements 🔗

If mental imagery is thinking in pictures, propositions are thinking in statements. A proposition is the smallest unit of meaning that can be judged true or false. “The cat is on the mat” is a proposition. So is “Delhi is the capital of India.” Propositions don’t need pictures; they capture relationships between concepts in an abstract, language-like format.

The theory of propositional representation was championed in 1973 by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn. He argued that what feels like a picture in our heads is actually a byproduct of deeper, symbolic codes. As explained in cognitive psychology texts, relationships between objects can be represented as symbolic formulas – a bottle under a table might be stored mentally as something like UNDER(BOTTLE, TABLE), not as a literal picture.

Why propositions are powerful 🔗

Propositions have three big advantages. First, they are unambiguous: the statement “the book is to the left of the lamp” specifies a relationship precisely, while a mental picture might leave details fuzzy. Second, they are efficient; a complex scene can be captured in a handful of symbolic relations. Third, they connect smoothly with language and reasoning, which is why propositions are central to logic, mathematics, and argumentation.

Scholars have long argued that pure imagery alone cannot be the full story of thought, because thought apparently arises from more abstract propositional representations that function like unambiguous language-like assertions. When you consider the word “port,” you aren’t sure whether you are thinking of a harbour or a wine – but you rarely feel that uncertainty in your own thinking, which suggests something more precise than a picture is at work.

The imagery debate: pictures or propositions? 🔗

The contrast between imagery and propositions sparked one of cognitive psychology’s most famous arguments – the Imagery Debate of the 1970s and 80s. Kosslyn led the “pictorial” camp, arguing that at least some mental representations are genuinely depictive. Pylyshyn led the “propositional” camp, arguing that imagery is an epiphenomenon – a kind of mental display screen that doesn’t do the real computational work.

Decades of experiments have produced evidence on both sides. Modern neuroimaging studies show that visual imagery activates the primary visual cortex, supporting the idea that imagery really does share machinery with perception. At the same time, many cognitive tasks are clearly best explained by abstract, propositional codes. Today most researchers accept a dual-code view, first proposed by Allan Paivio, in which the mind uses both formats depending on the task.

Johnson-Laird’s mental models 🔗

Another influential synthesis comes from Philip Johnson-Laird, who proposed that people reason using “mental models” – structured representations that can be image-like or abstract depending on what the problem demands. When you decide how furniture will fit into a room, a spatial model serves well; when you debate a policy, a propositional model works better.

How imagery and propositions work together 🔗

In everyday thinking, these two formats rarely operate alone. Suppose you’re planning a holiday to Goa. You might visualise the beach, the shacks, and the sunset – pure mental imagery. But you also weigh propositions: “flights are cheaper in September,” “the monsoon usually ends by October,” “my leave is approved.” The final decision emerges from a blend of the two.

The same interplay shows up in classrooms. A geography student picturing the course of the Ganga is using imagery; reciting that “the Ganga originates at Gangotri” is using a proposition. Good learning often stitches the two together, which is why diagrams paired with explanations tend to produce stronger memory than either alone.

Why this matters beyond the classroom 🔗

Understanding the structure of thinking has practical consequences. In education, teachers can design lessons that engage both visual and verbal pathways. In therapy, clinicians can work with intrusive imagery in trauma or restructure distorted propositions in depression. In public administration and policy, officials who think critically and reflectively – rather than reactively – tend to design better programmes. Even the government’s own training frameworks for civil servants emphasise reasoning, evaluation, and problem-solving as core competencies for effective governance.

Thinking, in short, is the invisible engine behind almost everything humans do well. Mental imagery lets us rehearse, plan, and imagine. Propositions let us reason, compare, and communicate. Together, they allow us to live not just in the physical world, but in the far larger world of possibility.

What do you think? When you tackle a difficult problem – like choosing a career path or planning a project – do you find yourself leaning more on vivid mental images or on carefully stated reasons and facts? And could deliberately balancing the two help you think more clearly?

References

1. https://dictionary.apa.org/cognition
2. https://www.psychologydiscussion.net/thinking/thinking-types-development-and-tools-psychology/2058
3. https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/psychology/cognitive-psychology/concepts-of-thinking/
4. https://www.ncert.nic.in/pdf/nep/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/
6. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1504933112
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4595480/
8. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Psychology/Cognitive_Psychology/Cognitive_Psychology_and_Cognitive_Neuroscience_(Wikibooks)/08:_Imagery/8.03:_The_Imagery_Debate
9. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/mental-imagery
10. https://dopt.gov.in/