10-Imagery&Foresight Flashcards
According to the Oxford dictionary, what is the mind?
The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world & their experiences, to think & to feel
Representations are ABOUT something; they have a referent & a sense. Describe the two types of representation
Analogue - have a one to one representation (e.g. analogue clock – each time a second passes the arm moves; image on retina maps one to one with outside world); & Propositional/allegorical - more arbitrary (e.g. digital clock - difference between 3 & 4 is arbitrary)
Why is imagery important?
It frees us from the present; frees us from reality; allows us to practice without moving; can create mental maps (e.g. traverse a path we’ve never walked before; orient ourselves)
Describe Paivio’s dual coding hypothesis;
According to him, why are concrete words remembered better than abstract words?
Information is represented in a verbal & an imaginal (visual) code; it might be coded or stored in either or both systems;
Concrete words can be stored in both codes while abstract words may only be stored in verbal code
Describe the Conceptual-Propositional hypothesis as proposed by Anderson & Bower;
What does this suggest?
When giving participants predicate (or propositional) calculus (relationship {subject, object}; e.g. kissed {boy, girl}), then they have to recognise them in a bigger list, they’re more likely to store & retrieve the general gist, rather than an analogue recording of the word order;
Analogue storage is beyond our capacity; storage is likely to be in a propositional format
Describe the evidence supporting propositional effects on mental imagery, as found in the barbells/spectacles experiment
Participants were presented with an image (circle-line-circle) paired with a word (barbells/spectacles); when paired with spectacle, they were more likely to pick the target with the shorter bridge (if just the image was stored they’d choose the longer target)
When something is represented in an image, it’s more concrete & specific than propositional. Describe 3 types of evidence supporting analogue effects on mental imagery
Transformation (can’t be explained propositionally); size effect (when imagining a frog next to an elephant, it takes longer to answer due to size of the elephant); & image scanning (there’s a linear relationship between distance on a real map & reaction time to imagine the distance)
Explain the Functional Equivalence hypothesis by Shepard & Kosslyn
Mental imagery is not abstract propositional but is also not a simple analogue representation of the external world; relationship between objects in imagery are functionally equivalent to the relationships these objects have in the real world; perception & imagery use the same cognitive mechanisms (e.g. mental rotation)
What’s the hypothesis regarding the mental rotation experiment?;
What does this suggest?
There is a linear increase in reaction time (choosing same or different) the more the object is rotated;
Rotation of the object is imagined (analogue representation)
Propositional accounts continue to question the evidence for functional equivalence. What do they suggest the effects may be explained by?
Demand characteristics (participants respond in the way they think the experimenter wants them to); but baboons also show the rotation effect – just faster
Rather than forming a representation of an object & then rotating it, what may we actually do?
Form a representation of a rotating object
Why do mental images behave as physical objects?
Because their evolutionary function is to represent the physical world
Researchers have questioned whether imagery uses the same cognitive resources as visual perception. What did Corballis & McClaren (1982) find in regards to interference?
Rotation aftereffects; if aftereffects spin in the same direction, RT is faster (accelerates) & is slower if the opposite way (perceptual effect influences how you do the mental task)
Segal & Fuscella (1970) had participants perform an auditory detection task (did a tone occur?) & visual detection task (did a line occur?), then performed these tasks whilst imagining a phone ringing or a visual scene. What did they find?
Many errors when imagining things in the same modality (e.g. vis-vis/aud-aud); drawing on the same resources interferes with optimum performance; no interference when modalities were crossed (e.g. vis-aud)
Dreams are generally reported as visual & kinesthetic experiences rather than auditory, tactile or olfactory. According to Symons’ interference hypothesis, why could this be?
We can afford visual hallucinations because our eyes are closed & it’s dark; but alarm cries, smell of predators or the panicky grasp of an infant, remain important cues that require unimpaired vigilance of the senses of hearing, smell & touch during sleep
When Bisiach & Luzzatti had patients with visual neglect syndrome (with damage to right parietal lobe) describe or imagine the Piazza, what did they find?
Neglect/impairment also in imaginary space (could also only imagine details on the left & ignored the other side)
Farah tested patients before & after an occipital lobectomy, where they had them imagine a horse & estimate the distance it had to be to fill the visual field. What occurred?
They perceived a reduced image size after the operation in both vision & imagery (tunnel imagery); imaginary space was reduced
In PET scans by Goldenberg et al. (1990), which brain areas were found to show activation when engaging in imagery?
Occipital & temporal parietal activation; primary visual & higher memory areas
Kosslyn et al. (1995) found greater activation in the visual cortex when what?;
Why could this be?
Imagining rather than perceiving;
Top-down processing more demanding than bottom-up image creation (takes more effort to create a visual image rather than being a recipient in visual perception; corresponds with individual differences)
ERP results by Farah & Peronnet (1989) revealed that subjects who claim to have vivid imagery showed what?
Stronger occipital ERP effects
Georgopoulos took single cell recordings of directional cells in the motor cortex of a monkey, who was trained to point his arm at a light & depending on where it points, neurons reflected the direction. In a second experiment, he had to point 90 degrees to the right of the light. What was found?
Cellular directional vector rotation was equivalent to mental rotation data; neurological correspondence to rotation in the mind
What’s “Mentalese”?
The language of the mind; thinking can be in verbal, imaginal & conceptual-propositional form
What notion does neurocognitive studies lend further support in regards to imagery & perception?
That they engage some of the same cognitive resources & show some functional equivalence
What evidence has been found in the field of cognitive neuroscience, contributing to imagery research?
The modality specific visual nature of mental imagery (damage to visual areas tend to result in loss of the same properties in imagery; imagery of a variety of imagery tasks shows activation in the visual cortex); neuronal functional equivalence (neuronal population vector corresponds to mental rotation); imagery is different from perception (involves more activation; additional activation in memory areas)
What’s an advantage of imagery & foresight?
Our own private time machine – we can relive past events (episodic memory) & future events (episodic foresight); we can reflect on these (evaluate their likelihood & desirability) & draw conclusions (prepare for them & shape the future)
Mental time travel into the past & future share close links in the mind & brain, & may be two sides of the same cognitive coin. Describe some of these commonalities
Similar: brain activation (medial temporal & medial prefrontal lobe); psychological characteristics (more temporally distant events are more abstract & de-contextualised); impairment (amnesic patients have same problems with imagining future events; depressed & schizophrenic patients show parallel impairments with past & future); development (accurately reporting events from yesterday & tomorrow co-emerges between age 3-4; decline with advanced age of mental time travel in both directions)
Memory enables simulation of potential future events. Give two examples
Extrapolation – past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour; vocabulary for re-combination – we can reassemble basic elements (actors, acts & objects) into novel scenarios
What’s the price of the flexibility we need to construct scenarios of the future?;
What could this possibly explain?
When we reconstruct past events, we may at times do so creatively rather than faithfully (we store the basic gist but reconstruct things that didn’t happen);
Characteristic errors of episodic memory; episodic memory may be an adaptive design feature of our foresight system
How did Clayton & Dickinson seem to discover episodic-like memory in scrub jays?;
Although they preferred worms over nuts, what happened when they were cached a long time ago?
They seemed to recover food caches according to what was stored (worms or nuts), where they were stored (left or right side of tray) & when (cached 4 hrs ago or 120 hours ago);
They’d search for nuts instead, as worms decay & become unpalatable
The idea of mental time travel in animals has received some skepticism. What have Suddendorf, Busby & Corballis questioned?
Whether birds just know what is where & whether it’s still good to eat (semantic rather than episodic memory); could also be associative learning linking the what & where, & a use-by-date attached to this representation (if palatable, then reinforced, if rotten they get punished); learnt association between strength of memory & outcome; & double dissociation (knowing what, where & when does not equal mental time travel)
We can ask humans whether they remember or merely know, but not with animals as it’s not readily demonstrable without language. What’s an alternative study approach according to Suddendorf & Corballis?
Study foresight – mental time travel into the future should be evident in flexible future-directed behaviour; do animals imagine the remote future & act prudently as a result? (if so, this shows evidence of mental foresight)
Being prepared matters. Give three examples of innate predispositions that allow animals to deal with or adapt to long-term regularities (which could be considered foresight);
What’s another way animals prepare for the future?
Coli (bacteria) prepare by activating genes necessary to digest maltose, while they’re still in a lactose rich environment; nest building for future breeding; hibernation for recurring food shortage;
Individual learning – CS predicts the arrival of US (but this is stimulus bound & only predicts the very near future; there are some longer term versions for specific domains, such as food aversion & caching in scrub jays)
Although there are increasing research efforts to demonstrate some competence of mental time travel in animals, what has not yet been found?
Evidence for domain general, flexible acts to secure remote future benefits
What good is foresight?
We can imagine virtually any potential future scenario (brain scanning studies suggest it’s what we do when we are “idle”); allows us to act now to secure future advantages (from shopping to planning retirement; future-directed action independent of current stimuli or drive; coordinating long-term goals, complex plans & strategies); human survival heavily depends on foresight
