Chapter 7 Mental Imagery Flashcards
What is mental imagery (aka imagery)
Refers to the mental representation of stimuli when those stimuli are not physically present in the environment
What is visual imagery
The mental representation of visual stimuli
What is auditory imagery
The mental representation of auditory stimuli
How to study mental imagery
No observable and fades quickly
Make judgements of a mental images corresponding with a physical object
Shepard and Metzler’s research
Same/different task using pairs of line drawing
Reaction time to decide
Decision time is influenced by the amount of rotation required to match the figures
Role of instructions
Standard instructions -right frontal lobe and perineal a lobe
Rotate self- temporal lobe adn motor cortex
What is analog code
Representation that closely resembles the physical object
What is propositional code
An abstract language-like representation; storage is neither visual nor spatial, and it does not physically resemble the original stimulus
What is analog perspective
Create a mental image of an object that resemble the actual, perceptual image on your retina
Similar to responses to physical objects
What is propositional perspective
Mental images stored in an abstract, language-like from that does not physically resemble the original stimulus
Visual imagery and ambiguous figures summary
People create mental images using both propositional and analog codes
What are demand characteristics
All the cues that might convey the experimenter’s hypothesis to the participant
Experimenter expectancy
What is pitch
A characteristic of a sound stimulus that can be arranged on a scale from low to high
What is auditory imagery
The mental representation of sounds when the sounds are not physically present
Ex- laughter, song, car sounds, animals
Auditory processes
What is timbre
A characteristic of sound describing the quality of a tone (flute vs. trumpet)
What is a cognitive map
Mental representation of geographic information, including the enviroment that surrounds us
Relationships among objects
Characteristics of cognitive maps
Homes, neighborhoods cities, countries used for areas too large to be seen in a single glance
Real-world settings
Ecological validity
Spatial cognition of cognitive maps
Remembering the world we navigate keeping track of objects in a spatial array
Idk
What is survey knowledge
The relantionships among locations that we acquire by directly learning a map or by repeatedly exploring an enviroment
What is heuristic
General problem-solving strategy that usually produces a correct solution… but not always
Are cognitive maps accurate?
Generally yes
Errors can be traced to rational strategies that are based on systematic distortions of reality
What distorts estimating the distance between two known points
Number of intervening locations
Category membership
Landmarks
What is the landmark effect
General tendency to provide shorter distance estimates when traveling to a landmark, rather than a non-landmark
Cognitive maps and Shape
Construct cognitive maps in shapes that are more regular than they are in reality
More like 90 degree angles
Rotation heuristic
We remember a slightly tilted geographical structure as being either more vertical or more horizontal then it really is
Alignment heuristic
We remember a series of geographic structures as being arranged in a straighter line then they really are
Both heuristics
the construction of cognitive maps that are more orderly and schematic than geographic reality.
Heuristics make sense, but can cause us to miss important details and fail to pay attention to bottom-up information
What is border bias
People estimate that the distance between two specific locations is larger if they are on different sides of a geographic border, compared to two locations on the same side of that border
What is the spatial framework model
Emphasizes that the above-below spatial dimension is especially important in our thinking, the front-back dimension is moderately important, and the right-left dimension is the least important
Conclusion about situated cognition approach
People make use of helpful information in the immediate environment or situation.
Knowledge depends on the surrounding context.
What we know depends on the situation that we are in.
Central Importance of Spatial Thinking language
use spatial diagrams to represent relationships
