An image schema is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. Image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions, from linguistic experience, and from historical context. The term is explained in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind, in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking.
In contemporary cognitive linguistics, an image schema is considered an embodied prelinguistic structure of experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings. Evidence for image schemata is drawn from a number of related disciplines, including work on cross-modal cognition in psychology, from spatial cognition in both linguistics and psychology, and from neuroscience.
Read more about Image Schema: Johnson: From Image Schemas To Abstract Reasoning Via Metaphor, Lakoff: Image Schemas in Brugman's The Story of Over, Relationships To Similar Theories, Lists of Image Schemas
Famous quotes containing the word image:
“Who can wonder that the world is known
So well by man, since himself is one?
The same composure in his form is shewed,
And man’s the little image of the God.”
—Marcus Manilius (10 B.C.–A.D. 30)