1.1. Nature of Mental Imagery
he main feature of human interactions with or in the physical world (natural interactions) is an explicit or implicit use of a human of the natural experience (EN), the becoming of which occurs in the intellectual processing of behavioral actions for the future reuse.
In the general case, any new item of EN begins its life cycle with mental processing the information flows coming from the senses. In cases, when informational input flows are absent or explicitly do not use, the becoming of a new item can begin with activating the phenomenon of mental imagery, and its activation can be unpredictable or deliberate. There are numerous definitions that are specified this phenomenon from different viewpoints but our research orients on following functions of the phenomenon:
- 1.
“Allows us to simulate reality at will, and, because of this, allows us to predict what we would experience in a specific situation or after we perform a specific action;”
- 2.
“Allow us to generate specific predictions based on experience.”
It should be noted; the mental imagery is the part of the intelligence, which activates this phenomenon in common mental processes in accordance with the laws of mind. Usually, the semantics of signs or signals activates these phenomena, and this occurs both in human interactions as with the physical world so with a computerized environment.
In the described research, our attention focuses on an appearance of a new task in designing the SIS. There are varied situations that signalize about the necessity to bind with them the new task and include it to a set of tasks appointed to the designer.
Let us suppose, the similar situation is formed when the designer is working with one of the appointed tasks in the computerized environment, and in this time, some signal about the new task appears on the monitor of the computer, with which the designer interacts.
In interactions with a computer, human senses focus on a computerized medium, from which they can get audio and video information in forms that are created by programmers who used appropriate kinds of data and their materializations. By other words, programmers used appropriate solutions from the theory and practice of HCI. Consequently, the perception of audio and video artifacts will reflect results of computerized solutions, and interfaces built by designers will provide interactions of users with computer's applications.
It should be noted, perceiving such audio and video information via interfaces, the human mind will process it by using functions of intelligence, including functions of mental imagery. Such processing will continue the computer processing that created informational flows from the computer side. Thus, integral processing has two components of natural and artificial types correspondingly, and final results of interactions with the computer will essentially depend on a way, which uses for the coordination of these components.
One of such ways could be based on interfaces that provide a transition of the human (developer or user) to visual modeling aimed at support of the mental imagery be activating that concerns the new task. For the initial awareness of the new task, thinking tries to express it in an understandable form by conducting the actions (doing) with conceptual components that are appropriate and useful. Thus, thinking and doing with conceptual objects (in mind) lead to an initial statement of the task on the initial level of understanding. Such process can be interpreted as a mental experiment in which the understanding confirms that the formed statement (or its part) is adequate to the discovered new task.