Lecture 4 (Ch. 10 Visual Imagery) Flashcards
What is mental imagery and visual imagery?
Mental imagery: Sensory Impression in absence of sensory input
Visual imagery: “seeing” in the absence of a visual stimulus
What is the imagery debate?
The use of different codes to solve problems involving imagery.
Analog - spatial mechanisms (Kosslyn) vs. Propositional - related to language (Pylyshyn)
How are imagery and perception different?
Give 2 examples.
Imagery is necessarily top-down and perception bottom-up.
Also, some people can see very well (perception) but can’t imagine things well at all (imagery).
Example 1: C.K –> cannot visually recognize objects (perception) but when asked to imagine and then draw an object he was fine. double dissociation with R.M –> can recognize objects and draw them, but when asked to draw from memory couldn’t do it.
Example 2: In neuroimaging - occipital regions activated only when perceiving an object. But frontal regions were active in both perceiving AND imagining.
Give 2 examples how are imagery and perception the same?
Example 1: Single neurons that were recorded while perceiving a baseball also fired when person was imagining a baseball.
Example 2: People with prosopagnosia have difficulty in both perceiving faces and imagining faces.
Define the conceptual peg hypothesis.
Concrete nouns create images that other words can hang onto.
What are mental scanning tasks?
Subjects create mental images and then scan them in their minds.
What is the importance of the “where” pathway in the brain?
- Location and spatial relations - in parietal lobe
- Important for thinking and reasoning - STEM (science, technology, engineering, math)
What are the three components of spatial cognition?
- Location and position in spatial array (where)
- Construction of cognitive map
- Memory of changes within the spatial environment (Map)
What is the mental walk task?
People imagined they were walking towards an animal until it filled their visual field - the bigger the animal the less they walked; the smaller the animal the closer they got to it. This shows that perception and imagery are both spatial as Kosslyn said.
