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Cognitive Processes > Chapter 4: Mental Imagery > Flashcards

Chapter 4: Mental Imagery Flashcards

1
Q

Epiphenomenon (Pylyshyn)

A

A mental experience that has no functional role in information processing.

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2
Q

What was Dennett’s argument on mental imagery?

A

If we cannot count the stripes in a mental image of a tiger, we are not having a real perceptual experience.

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3
Q

Mental Imagery

A

The processing of perceptual-like information in the absence of an external source for the perceptual information.

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4
Q

Roland & Friberg (1985)

A

The investigators measured changes in blood flow in the brain as participants either mentally rehearsed a nine-word circular jingle or mentally rehearsed finding their way around streets in their neighborhoods.

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5
Q

Be able to label and explain brain regions in Roland & Friberg’s experiment

A
  • When participants engaged in the verbal jingle task, there was activation in the prefrontal cortex near Broca’s area and in the parietal-temporal region of the posterior cortex near Wernicke’s area.
  • When participants engaged in the visual task, there was activation in the parietal cortex, occipital cortex, and temporal cortex. All these areas are involved in visual perception and attention.
  • The same regions of the brain fire up regardless of whether or not someone is mentally imaging a scene / words, or actually completing the task in real life.
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6
Q

Explain the Santa experiment and what results were found? (Geometric & verbal arrangement)

A

SEE PAGE 107.

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7
Q

What is one function of mental imagery?

A

One function of mental imagery is to anticipate how objects will look from different perspectives.

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8
Q

Mental Rotation

A

The process of continuously transforming the orientation of a mental image.

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9
Q

What did Shepard & Metzler study?

A

Mental rotation.

  • Occurred from a dream Shepard had of a 3-D shape rotating in space.
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10
Q

Explain the Shepard & Metzler study (1971)

A
  • Mentally rotating 3-D cubed objects

- Page 109.

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11
Q

What is angular disparity?

A

the amount one object would have to be rotated to match the other object in orientation.

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12
Q

What were the results from the linear graphs in the Shepard & Metzler study?

A

Processing an object in depth (in three dimensions) does not appear to have taken longer than processing an object in the picture plane. Hence, participants must have been operating on 3-D mental images of the objects in both the picture-plane and depth conditions.

  • The greater the angle of disparity between the two objects, the longer participants took to complete the mental rotation.
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13
Q

Which regions of the brain are active during mental rotation?

A

-Parietal region (bottom-back parietal lobe) [because parietal region is responsible for spatial location information].

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14
Q

Which area of the brain becomes activated when someone is imagining their hand rotating? (Kosslyn).

A

Motor Cortex.

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15
Q

Georgopoulos (1989)

A
  • Monkeys moved a handle counterclockwise to a specific position in response to a given stimulus.
  • Results: Found that particular cells fired depending on where the monkeys moved the handle (ex. certain cells fired for the 9 oclock position; others fired for the 12oclock position).
  • These results suggest that mental rotation involves gradual shifts of firing from cells that encode the initial stimulus (the handle at its initial angle) to cells that encode the response (the handle at its final angle).
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16
Q

Image Scanning

A

Mentally “scanning” an image.

- Ex. Mentally walking through your house to count all of the windows.

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17
Q

Brooks (1968) Experiment

A
  • Got participants to “trace’ out the letter ‘F’: categorizing each corner of the block as a point on the top or bottom (assigned a yes response) or as a point in between (assigned a no response). In the example (beginning with the starting corner), the correct sequence of responses is yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes.
  • when people are scanning a mental image, they are scanning a representation that is analogous to a physical picture.
  • Rest on Pg 112.
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18
Q

Baddeley & Lieberman (1976)

A

TRY TO EXPLAIN WHAT IS HAPPENING BETWEEN THIS EXPERIMENT AND THE BROOKS EXPERIMENT!

  • the nature of the impairment in the Brooks task was spatial, not visual.
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19
Q

Moyer (1973)

A
  • interested in the speed with which participants could judge the relative size of two animals from memory.
  • judgment time decreases linearly with increases in the difference between the estimated sizes of the two animals.
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20
Q

Johnson (1939)

A
  • Got participants to compare the lengths of physical lines.
  • It is reasonable to expect that the more similar the lengths being compared, the longer will be the time for perceptual judgments, because the difficulty of the task increases as the difference in lengths decreases.
  • ## The fact that similar functions are obtained when mental images are compared (Figure 4.8) and when physical objects are compared (Figure 4.9) indicates that making mental comparisons involves the same processes as those involved in perceptual comparisons.
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21
Q

What does the Finke, pinker, & Farah (1989) experiment tell us about visual imagery?

A
  • Imagine a capital letter N. Connect a diagonal line from the top right corner to the bottom left corner. Now rotate the figure 90° to the right. What do you see?
  • Imagine a capital letter D. Rotate the figure 90° to the left. Now place a capital letter J at the bottom. What do you see?
  • The ability to perform such tasks illustrates an important function of imagery: It enables us to construct new objects in our minds and inspect them. It is just this sort of visual synthesis that structural engineers or architects must perform as they design new bridges or buildings.
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22
Q

Chambers & Reisberg (1985)

A
  • Briefly shown ambiguous pictures that have a double image (Ex., bird / rabbit).
  • This result suggests that mental images differ from pictures in that one can interpret visual images, even images of ambiguous figures, only in one way.
23
Q

What do brain imaging studies indicate?

A

the same regions are involved in visual perception as in visual imagery.

24
Q

What are the parietal regions involved in?

A

Attending to locations and objects, and mental rotation.

25
Q

Fusiform Face Area

A

A part of the temporal cortex that is especially involved in fine discriminations, particularly of faces.

26
Q

Parahippocampal Place Area

A

A region adjacent to the hippocampus that is active when people are perceiving locations (Ex., indoor or outdoor scenes).

27
Q

O’Craven & Kanwisher (2000)

A

O’Craven and Kanwisher asked participants either to view faces and scenes or to imagine faces and scenes.

  • The same areas (of the brain) were active when the participants were viewing as when they were imagining.
  • ALSO: activation in the primary visual cortex (1st place to receive visual information) during imagery. Such results are important because they suggest that visual imagery includes relatively low-level perceptual processes.
  • The responses during imagery were very similar to the responses during perception, although a little weaker. The fact that the response was weaker during imagery is consistent with the behavioral evidence we have reviewed suggesting that it is more difficult to process an image than a real perception.
28
Q

Kosslyn (1999)

A
  • used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the causal role of these regions in the performance of the underlying task.
  • presented participants with four-quadrant arrays and asked them to form a mental image of the array. Then, with their eyes closed, participants had to use their image to answer questions like “Which has longer stripes: Quadrant 1 or Quadrant 2?”
  • Application of TMS to disrupt processing in area 17 in the primary visual cortex significantly increased the time participants took to answer these questions. The fact that temporarily disrupting these visual regions results in slower performance in the visual imagery task suggests that they do play a causal role in mental imagery.
29
Q

Imagery involves:

A

Spatial & Visual components

30
Q

Parietal regions support?

A

spatial component of visual imagery.

  • When mental rotation occurs.
31
Q

Temporal regions support?

A

Visual component.

  • When people imagine visual properties of objects.
32
Q

Parietal brain damage

A

could not describe the locations of familiar objects or landmarks from memory, but he could describe the appearance of objects.

33
Q

Temporal brain damage

A

The patient with temporal damage had an impaired ability to describe the appearance of objects but could describe their locations.

34
Q

The capabilities of blind individuals

A

Blind individuals are capable of forming spatial imagery, using information gained through nonvisual modalities such as haptic perception (touch) and auditory perception. Blind individuals can then use such a mental representation of their environment to navigate through it.

  • Like sighted individuals, blind participants can explore two objects haptically and judge whether they are rotations of one another, and, like sighted individuals, their response times are affected by the degree of rotation.
  • Blind individuals who nagivate their environment are just as good as sighted individuals in judging where things are from a verbal description of the layout of a room.
35
Q

VVIQ

A

Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire: measures how vivid an individuals mental imagery is.

36
Q

Is there a relationship between strong vivid mental imagery and spatial awareness? Why or why not?

A

NO.

  • Participants failed on a spatial experiment where they were supposed to imagine how a hole punched into a folded piece of paper would look if they were to unfold the piece of paper mentally. Individuals with strong vivid imagery struggled with this task.
37
Q

Is there a relationship between strong vivid mental imagery and task-oriented experiments?

A

Yes

  • Individuals could find the object in a degraded image.
  • Individuals could recognize real world objects from blurred images.
38
Q

Less brain activity =

A

More vivid imagers

39
Q

More brain activity =

A

Less vivid imagers.

40
Q

Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov (2009)

A

Two distinct kinds of imagery abilities:

1 - Spatial
2 - Object oriented

Negatively related: People who score high in one category tend to score lower on the other.

41
Q

Cognitive Maps

A

Mental representations of the locations of objects and places in the environment.

42
Q

Route Maps

A

A representation of the environment consisting of the paths between locations but without spatial information.

  • Can also be a verbal description.
43
Q

Survey Map

A

A representation of the environment consisting of the position of locations in space.

44
Q

Hartley, Maguire, Spiers, and Burgess (2003)

A

Looked at brain activity in individuals using route and survey maps.

Results:

  • Route maps: Greater brain activation in the anterior regions and motor regions
  • Survey maps: Greater brain activation in areas similar to visual imagery; also, parietal cortex. Also greater activation in the hippocampus.
45
Q

What serves as an important part of survey maps and allow for flexible action?

A

landmarks.

46
Q

Foo, Warren, Duchon, and Tarr (2005)

A

Experiment using the presence and absence of landmarks.

  • Landmarks made a massive difference in helping the participant get from point A to point B.
47
Q

Egocentric Representation

A

A representation of the environment as it appears to the perception of an observer. “Space as we perceive it”. “describing space from your own perspective”

48
Q

Allocentric Representation

A

A representation of the environment according to a fixed coordinate system, as on a map. “Looking at a bird’s eye view of an area on a sheet of paper”.

49
Q

Gunzelmann & Anderson (2002)

A

Time required to find an object on a standard map in regards to the participant’s location and the direction in which the viewer is looking.

  • When the viewer is located to the south, looking north, it is easier to find the object than when the viewer is north looking south (the opposite of the map orientation).
50
Q

What is the key difference between physical maps and cognitive maps?

A

Physical maps show the effects of orientation. People find it much easier to point to various objects on the map if they are oriented in the same way the map is.

51
Q

Which part of the brain could play a vital role in maintaining an allocentric representation of the world?

A

Hippocampus

52
Q

Which part of the brain could play a vital role in maintaining an egocentric representation of the world?

A

Parietal Cortex.

53
Q

Stevens & Coupe (1978)

A

Mental maps have a hierarchical structure, which for the most part, has a systematic distortion when it comes to labelling geographical areas. People rely too much on higher order information (Ex in study: “Countries” were labelled on the map).

  • When people have to work out the relative positions of two locations, they will often reason in terms of the relative positions of larger areas that contain the two locations.

Cognitive Processes (5 decks)

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