Abstract: To examine the hypothetical role of the eyes in visual mental imagery of movement 72 undergraduate women students in psychology were asked to imagine a running horse and then to produce the same mental image without moving the eyes and the head. In 59% of the subjects interesting modifications of the imagined movement appeared: 37% observed an inhibition of the movement and 19% an evident slowing up of the moving figure. The interpretation of this result was made by hypothesizing that the eyes are concretely involved in visual imagery processes.

Abstract: Ten patients with semantic dementia resulting from bilateral anterior temporal lobe atrophy, and 10 matched controls, were tested on an object recognition task in which they were invited to choose (from a four-item array) the picture representing “the same thing” as an object picture that they had just inspected and attempted to name. The target in the response array was never physically identical to the studied picture but differed from it – in the various conditions – in size, angle of view, colour or exemplar (e.g. a different breed of dog). In one test block for each patient, the response array was presented immediately after the studied picture was removed; in another block, a 2 min filled delay was inserted between study and test. The patients performed relatively well when the studied object and target response differed only in the size of the picture on the page, but were significantly impaired as a group in the other three type-of-change conditions, even with no delay between study and test. The five patients whose structural brain imaging revealed major right-temporal atrophy were more impaired overall, and also more affected by the 2 min delay, than the five patients with an asymmetric pattern characterised by predominant left-sided atrophy. These results are interpreted in terms of a hypothesis that successful classification of an object token as an object type is not a pre-semantic ability but rather results from interaction of perceptual and conceptual processing.

Abstract: This review examines the biological background to the development of ideas on rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep), so-called paradoxical sleep (PS), and its relation to dreaming. Aspects of the phenomenon which are discussed include physiological changes and their anatomical location, the effects of total and selective sleep deprivation in the human and animal, and REM sleep behavior disorder, the latter with its clinical manifestations in the human. Although dreaming also occurs in other sleep phases (non-REM or NREM sleep), in the human, there is a contingent relation between REM sleep and dreaming. Thus, REM is taken as a marker for dreaming and as REM is distributed ubiquitously throughout the mammalian class, it is suggested that other mammals also dream. It is suggested that the overall function of REM sleep/dreaming is more important than the content of the individual dream; its function is to place the dreamer protagonist/observer on the topographical world. This has importance for the developing infant who needs to develop a sense of self and separateness from the world which it requires to navigate and from which it is separated for long periods in sleep. Dreaming may also serve to maintain a sense of 'I'ness or “self” in the adult, in whom a fragility of this faculty is revealed in neurological disorders.