The answer to the OP is “we have no way of knowing,” which should be obvious to anybody who gave it a moment’s thought. Then I followed it with an example from a real-life scientific study which showed an ape who would use visual aids to masturbate. We will never know what additional mental visualizations she used, but the idea of her forming a fantasy based on Mr October is not unreasonable.
Would you prefer it the way I first read it in Psychology Today, “Lucy would put down her drink, lay the Playgirl centerfold on the floor, rub and bounce her pudenda on it until she appeared to have an orgasm, then pick up her drink and light a satisfied cigarette”? I cleaned it up! As for your Puritanical reaction, the higher apes are a lot grosser than hummingbirds.
And I repeat that don’t do outrageous. Reality is outrageous enough. The Temerlins fucked that poor girl up but good. The drinking (she liked her gin neat) and smoking were not my additions to make it “outrageous” but were part of their study. Same with the masturbation–she would also use a vacuum cleaner. Study up on her before you make any more accusations.
Err…yeah, anyway, getting back to the actual subject of the OP, there seems to be a fundamental assumption there that I would personally question; that is, that visual imagination - imagination with visual ‘qualia’ attached - is a fairly high-level cognitive task, that we might possibly expect might divide ‘higher’ animals, like humans, from ‘lower’ ones.
I really doubt that. It seems quite clear that imagination in the broad sense (that is, the ability to make a mental model of a situation that is not currently present, and to change your behaviour based on that model) is an ability that any animal that can use memory and solve puzzles (by some other method than random trial and error) must surely have. If a rat remembers that it has to press the blue lever then it can run into the other room and get a food pellet - that’s using a mental model of the world.
And seeing a picture in front of your ‘minds eye’ that looks substantially like the situation you want to engineer yourself into seems like the simplest and most straightforward of all possible mental models. (Though in the case of many mammals, especially dogs, it might be more likely that they have a ‘mind’s nose’ that actually gives them an experience of a scent they’re thinking about)
In the case of humans who don’t do visual imagery (speaking as one of those types myself) what we tend to use to cover the same ground is verbal/logical/abstract models. And that is some complicated shit - I don’t think that a rat who learns how to push the blue lever to get food is thinking in words ‘after I do this, I can go to the other room and get the yums’ which is totally the mental model that I would use. It is possible, I guess that they have some sort of inchoate ‘needing to be in the other room’ feeling which they trigger by pressing the lever, but much more likely IMO that seeing minds eye pictures of one thing happening then another thing happening is the usual way that animals problem-solve
Animals can certainly dream, and it would be surprising if for some reason they were unable to have visual dreams. So I would conclude from that that they can harbor mental images different from what they can physically see at that particular time.
It would be surprising to me if we were the only animals able to do this.
No-one has a problem accepting that evolution has created a spectrum of brain processing power, nor that there is probably a spectrum of self-awareness and higher brain functions associated with sentience. That being the case I have no problem accepting that the more intelligent members of the animal kingdom are capable, to a greater or lesser extent, of visualising objects. In fact, if that capability confers an evolutionary benefit then we should expect it to be present.
You can’t play memory picture games when your brain doesn’t actually show any pictures. As soon as I stop viewing the original, it’s gone. My mental “screen” is more or less blank.
As far as I can tell, for visuals I have “recording” but I don’t have “playback”.
For example, I can read a map OK while it’s in my hand, but if I’m going to put the map down, I have to memorize facts about where I’m going, not the look of the map - I can’t view an image and then bring it to mind later.
I remember seeing an experiment conducted on primates where they put a red dot on their foreheads, then put them in an enclosure with a mirror to see if they’d make the connection and recognize it was themselves in the mirror. And the dot was on them!
As I recall only one type of primate got it. Looked in the mirror and immediately touched the spot. Whereas all the rest made seemingly no connection whatsoever.
Not sure if this even touches on what the OP is looking for, but still interesting!
Mirror Test. Great apes can*, but lesser apes and monkey’s can’t. Elephants and dolphins can, also. It might surprise people that some birds and even some insects can.
As it happens, lately I’ve been spending some brainpower on creating a 3d design of a jellyfish. I’ve been imagining just which shapes I’d use in my preferred computer design environment, and just what tools I’d use to put them together and adjust the final result. All this, while I haven’t yet gotten around to actually doing any of it on the computer.
I watched a program on PBS called ‘Birdbrain’ they showed how wild crows can and do recognize and remember and actually warn other crows about the bad guy. The researcher wore a caveman mask while they caught and tagged some of the crows. A few generations later the crows still went berserk when the mask was worn again. Very interesting show. If a bird can recall a face why can’t an ape?. If there is memory there must be pictures, after all they don’t see words.
Corvids, like apes, are extremely intelligent. But recognizing a face does not mean that you can form an image of that face in the absence of the face.
They did say on the program that the crows who had never seen the mask before were just as alarmed by the mask. I guess all you need is one alarmed crow to cause the whole ‘murder of crows’ to have mass hysteria.
When I was a design engineer I would lay in bed visualizing what I needed. It was drudgery the next day putting it on screen because it was already designed. The shop making it was an afterthought because I already knew that it worked, but that doesn’t address the OP because we already know humans can visualize abstractly, can imagine.
Sadly, we can’t answer that without getting bogged down in “there are all kinds of imagination.” What we can do is study our closest relatives and other intelligent species. Dolphins can play the red dot game and I had a dog who seemed to recognize himself in a mirror, posing and admiring his teeth, not in a threatening way but like, “If I turn my head this way I can see that shiny canine tooth better.”* But imagination? We imagine human stuff. Dolphins imagine dolphin stuff. Lucy, I guess, imagined she was human because that was how she was brought up until she was twelve. Yes, the Temerlins let a preteen drink and then dumped her in rehabilitation center with other chimps where she was supposed to magically turn into a chimp. I hate those people.
Weirdly smart dog. Most of my dogs are unweirdly stupid. Er, limited.
We don’t really fully understand how we form pictures in our minds, let alone how apes do it. The “mind’s eye” idea is controversial at best, for instance, and discredited by the computationalists, those in cognitive science who believe that images are stored and processed representationally. But in any case, one might note that at least some apes are capable of problem solving of a kind that suggests an ability to visualize a solution; for instance, Wolfgang Kohler in The Mentality of Apes describes how chimpanzees would stack crates to reach bananas that were placed too high for them to reach. That would seem to require some level of visualization of how crates could be stacked and then used as a platform.
Apes can form 3D maps of their environment. A map is a kind of image. If you put an ape and a human, both used to the jungle, in an unfamiliar stretch of rocky jungle, and give them incentive to find a way out, the ape will far, far sooner have found that way out. Even if no climbing is involved.
I’d say I used my locational sense for that sort of task - that is, the knowledge of where stuff is supposed to go. Which isn’t really verbal/analytical … but then, that’s not a complex planning task.
Locational sense doesn’t come with pictures attached, it’s just a kind of core knowledge. But there would be running commentary going on in my mind at the same time (because there’s ALWAYS running commentary), and the more I was trying to make a good picture, the more I’d be supporting my efforts with logical analysis ('well, the tentacles need to be X times longer than the body…")
Could anyone do a halfway decent picture of *anything *with their eyes actually shut?
The claim was that birds who had not seen the researchers do “bad things” with the masks on would learn to be cautious of the men wearing the mask because they had heard warning calls from other crows when the men wearing masks were around. Those other crows had seen the “bad things”.