Imagine someone chopping vegetables on a cutting board. No, really. Before reading on, take a moment to truly visualize the scene as vividly as possible.
Try as you might, odds are your mental image will omit some basic features. Was the picture thorough enough to specify the size of the knife or the material of the cutting board? The kind of vegetables? The person’s gender? The color of their hair and clothes?
A recent study published in Cognition found that most people respond “yes” to some of these questions and “no” to others. Of course, there’s nothing unusual about failing to fill in every detail of a mental scene; even in reality, we often overlook the subtle nuances of our surroundings.
What is strange, however, is that in imagination we seem to leave out fundamental properties — things we couldn’t fail to notice if they appeared before us in real life.
