Chapter 7: Mental Images & Proposition Flashcards
The form for what you know in your mind about things, ideas, events, and so on, in the outside world.
Knowledge representation
Observation of one’s mental and emotional
processes.
Introspectionist Approach
Deduce logically how people represent knowledge.
Rationalist Approach
Refers to facts that can be stated, such as the date of your birth, the name of your best friend,
or the way a rabbit looks.
Declarative knowledge
Refers to knowledge of procedures that can be
implemented.
Procedural knowledge
2 main sources of empirical data on knowledge
representation.
Standard Laboratory Experiments
Neuropsychological studies
Experimental work, researchers indirectly study knowledge representation because they
cannot look into people’s minds directly.
Standard Laboratory Experiments
Researchers typically use one of two methods:
(1) they observe how the normal brain responds to various cognitive tasks involving knowledge
representation.
(2) they observe the links between various deficits in knowledge representation and associated pathologies in the brain.
Neuropsychological studies
The mental representation of things that are not
currently seen or sensed by the sense organs.
Imagery
Use both pictorial and verbal codes
for representing information in our
minds.
Dual-code theory
2 codes that organize knowledge into information that can be acted on, stored somehow, and later retrieved for subsequent use.
Analog codes
Symbolic codes
Resemble the objects they are representing.
Analog codes
A form of knowledge representation that has been chosen arbitrarily to stand for something that does not perceptually resemble what is
being represented.
Symbolic code
Suggests that we do not store mental
representations in the form of images or mere words.
Propositional theory
Secondary and derivative phenomena that occur as a result of other more basic cognitive processes.
Epiphenomena
A shorthand means to express the underlying meaning of a relationship.
Predicate calculus
A figure that can be interpreted in more than one way; are often used in studies of perception.
Ambiguous figure
This realignment would involve a shift in the positional orientations of the figures on the mental “page” or “screen”.
Mental realignment
Reinterpretation of parts of the figure.
Mental reconstrual
Participants first were shown another ambiguous figure involving realignment of the reference frame.
Implicit reference frame hint
Participants were asked to modify the reference frame.
Explicit reference frame hint
The front of the thing you were seeing as the back of something else.
Conceptual hint
Participants were directed to attend to regions of the figure where realignments or reconstruals were to occur.
Attentional hint
Participants were asked to construe an image from parts determined to be “good” rather than from parts determined to be “bad”.
Construals from “good” parts
Although visual imagery is not identical to
visual perception, it is functionally equivalent to it.
Functional equivalence hypothesis
Involves rotationally transforming an object’s visual mental image.
Mental rotation
A person ignores half of his or her visual field.
Spatial neglect
A person asked to imagine a scene and then
describe it ignores half of the imagined scene.
Representational neglect
An alternative synthesis of the literature suggests that mental representations may take
any of three forms: propositions, images, or
mental models.
Johnson-Laird’s mental models
3 forms that mental representations may take.
Propositions
Images
Mental models
Knowledge structures that individuals construct to understand and explain their experiences.
Mental models
2 kinds of images.
Visual imagery
Spatial imagery
Refers to the use of images that represent visual characteristics such as colors and shapes.
Visual imagery
Refers to images that represent spatial features such as depth dimensions, distances, and orientations.
Spatial imagery
Deals with the acquisition, organization, and use
of knowledge about objects and actions in 2-D and 3-D space.
Spatial cognition
Are internal representations of our physical
environment, particularly centering on spatial relationships.
Cognitive maps
3 types of knowledge when forming and using cognitive maps.
Landmark knowledge
Route-road knowledge
Survey knowledge
Information about particular features at
a location and which may be based on both imaginal and propositional representations
Landmark knowledge
Involves specific pathways for moving from one location to another; may be based on both procedural knowledge and declarative
knowledge.
Route-road knowledge
Involves estimated distances between
landmarks, much as they might appear on survey maps; may be represented imaginally
or propositionally (e.g., in numerically specified distances).
Survey knowledge
Rules of thumb that influence our estimations of distance; cognitive strategies.
Heuristics
