chapter ten

Question 1

visual imagery

Answer 1

seeing in the absence of a visual stimulus

Question 2

imagery extra notes

Answer 2

• form of elaboration
• recognition accuracy of images is higher than for words
• easier to remember words with high imagery potential

Question 3

imagery potential

Answer 3

• ease of generating an image
• high imagery potential for concrete concepts (i.e. chair)
• low imagery potential for abstract concepts (i.e. truth)
• recall best for high-imagery paired-associates (i.e. chair-apple)

Question 4

mental chronometry

Answer 4

• infer cognitive processes by measuring the time it takes to complete a cognitive task

Question 5

shepard and metzler

Answer 5

• measured the time to mentally rotate objects to make a verification judgement (match/no match)
• showed that the time it took to decide two views were the same object was directly related to how different the angles were

Question 6

mental scanning

Answer 6

• scanning a mental image
• visual scanning time for a picture is the same for visual scanning a visual image of that picture

Question 7

elephant and rabbit (imagery and perception)

Answer 7

• faster to answer questions about an image when one imagines that it takes up most of their visual field
• i.e. with the elephant / rabbit example

Question 8

perky

Answer 8

• perception and imagery experiment with banana
• participants asked to visualize a banana while unknowingly viewing a dimly projected image of a banana
• participants often mistook the dimly projected image as their mental image

Question 9

farah

Answer 9

• instructed participants to imagine a letter “H” or T” on screen
• flashed with two squares, one containing either H or T
• participants are faster to detect target location when the target (flashed letter) and mental image (choice of letter) are matched

Question 10

imagery neurons

Answer 10

• neurons in the visual cortex that fire when perceiving or imagining a specific object (i.e. a baseball)
• kreiman using electrodes implanted in temporal lobe

Question 11

le bihan et al.

Answer 11

• fMRI recordings reveal brain activations (imagery neurons firing) during perceiving and imagining an stimulus

Question 12

topographic map

Answer 12

• indicates that viewing small objects activates the back of the visual cortex vs larger objects that results in a spread of activity toward the front of the visual cortex

Question 13

evidence that imagery and perception share the same mechanisms

Answer 13

• imagery and perception reveal similar activity in the frontal lobe
• ablation of the visual cortex results in a decrease in image size
• difficulty with perception is associated with difficulty with creating images
• those with unilateral neglect will ignore objects in one half of the visual field one half of their mental image

Question 14

evidence that imagery and perception involve different mechanisms

Answer 14

• perception is automatic and stable while imagery takes effort and is fragile
• difficult to switch perceptions of an ambiguous image than picture
• dissociations between imagery and perception

Question 15

chalmers and reisberg

Answer 15

• difficult to switch perceptions of a mental image of an ambiguous figure
• i.e. the duck/rabbit ambiguous figure

Question 16

method of loci

Answer 16

• mnemonic involving mental image of a spatial layout
• memorize a familiar route (through your house)
• to remember a list of items, visualize item #1 at location #1, item #2 at location #2 etc.

Question 17

pegword technique

Answer 17

• mental image of objects associated with a concrete word to remember things
• i.e. “one-bun” example to remember dentist appointment then making a mental image of a mouth biting down on a bun

Question 18

how visual imagery was discovered

Answer 18

• kekule: said the structure of benzene came to him in a dream
• einstein: developed theory of relativity by imagining himself travelling beside a beam of light

Question 19

early ideas about imagery

Answer 19

• wundt: proposed that images were part of three basic elements of consciousness, with sensations and feelings; images accompanied thought
• imageless thought debate: thought is impossible without imagery
• galton: found that imagery wasn’t required for thinking because observed people who had difficulting forming images were still capable of thinking

Question 20

kosslyn’s experiment on mental scanning

Answer 20

• participants asked to memorize an object
• then to create an image of the object in their mind and focus on one part of the boat
• reasoned and found that if imagery (like perception) is spatial, then it should take longer to find parts farther from the initial point of focus

Question 21

the imagery debate

Answer 21

a debate on wether imagery is based on spatial mechanisms, such as ones involved in perception, or on propositional mechanisms, such as the ones involved with language

Question 22

propositional representations

Answer 22

• representations where relationships can be represented by abstract symbols, such as an equation or statement
• i.e. “the cat is under the table” as “the cat” → “is under” → “the table”

Question 23

mental walk task

Answer 23

• task in which participants imagine they were walking towards a mental image of an object

Question 24

multivoxel pattern analysis

Answer 24

• train classifier to associate a pattern of voxel activation with a particular stimuli
• then to present a stimulus to see if the classifier can identify it based on the voxel activity created by the stimulus

Question 25

individual differences in visual imagery

Answer 25

• kozhevnikov: presented a questionnaire to determine if participants preferred imagery (visualizers) or verbal-logical strategies (verbalizers)
• given tests to measure to types of imagery
• results of tests measured differences between the two

Question 26

degraded pictures task

Answer 26

• consisted of a number of degraded line drawings

Question 27

mental rotation task

Answer 27

• required partiipants to judge wether pictures were two views of the same object