Meta-imagery: conceptualization of mental imagery and its relationship with cognitive behavior

deas people have about visual imagery functioning have been studied especially within the hypothesis that tacit knowledge affects cognitive behaviour and makes it similar to expectations based on the assumption of an analogy between perception and imagery. The contrasting results of these studies seem partially due to differences in the adopted methodology. The present research considers imagery knowledge to be an ill-defined unstable domain which can lead to different way of understanding what imagery is, depending on the Questionnaire used. We submitted a version of a metacognitive Questionnaire devised by Denis and Carfantan (1985) to groups of young adults. Their ideas seemed to reflect the typical results of imagery experiments more closely than in the original research. In particular, the question presented together with an example produced different responses as compared with the responses of a group asked the same question without an example (Exp.1). The scanning time question, which appeared critical in both experiments, was further considered in two other experiments. These showed that people could change their mind across time, depending on question form, that their opinions before the experimental task predicted the actual behaviour shown during the test (Exp.2) and that different pre-experiment information is able to variously change the pattern of data (Exp.3). Results can be interpreted not only in the light of the tacit assumption criticism, but also by considering imagery a strategic controlled process which, in this case, can be affected by metacognitive knowledge.