Lecture 7 Flashcards
Mental imagery
Mental representation of stimuli when those stimuli are not present
-a top down process
—sensory receptors do not receive input
-knowledge driven
—uses info stored in LTM to create internal images
How do we study it?
-mental images resemble physical objects
—tf, people should make judgments about the image in the same way they make judgments about corresponding physical object
Mental rotations
Imagining an object in motion and viewing it from different perspectives
-moderate to large gender differences
Shepard and Metzler (1971)
-task in which you had to rotate 2D and 3D shapes to match the figure given
-found that large rotations take more time
Gender differences
-some studies report no gender differences
—effects of instructions and training
-experience with toys and sports can emphasize spatial skills
-can be modified by providing girls with experience in spatial activities
Cognitive maps
-mental representation of geographic info
-estimating distance between 2 known points can be distorted by
1. Number of intervening cities
2. Category membership
3. Landmarks
Number of intervening cities
Thorndyke (1981)
-study map of region u til you can reproduce it
-0,1,2,3 etc. cities along route
-estimate distance between pair of cities
-number of intervening cities had influence on estimates
Category membership
Hirtle and mascolo (1986)
-estimate distance between pair of locations
-people tended to ship location closer to other sites that belonged in same category
— ex. Government buildings
Mishra and Mishra (2010)
-border bias
-vacation home in Oregon or Washington
-when people hear about an earthquake they prefer to select a home in a. Different state
—rather than home equally close but in same state
Landmark
-landmark effect
—tendency to provide shorter distance estimates when travelling to a landmark
—Mcnorma & Diwadker (1997)
Synesthesia
-condition in which stimulus appropriate to one sense triggers experience appropriate to another sense
-inducer
—cue that elicits synesthetic experience
-concurrent
—the response
—can be concepts as well as precepts
Eidetic imagery
Images projected onto external world that persist for a moment or two after stimulus picture is removed
-perceived as being “out there” instead of inside the head
-descriptions of eidetic image are faster than memory reports
-more common in children
Cognitive dedifferentiation
-fusion of perceptual processs that typically function independently
—eidetic imagery is dedifferentiation of imagery and perception
Dual coding theory
Two ways of representing events
1. Verbal
2. Non-verbal
Concreteness
-degree to which a word refers to something that can be experienced by the senses
-body-object interaction
—ease with which human body can interact with a words referent
-emotions
—valence (pleasantness of stimulus)
—arousal (intensity provoked emotion)
—dominance (degree of control exerted by stimulus)
Nature of mental imagery
-images are epiphenomenal
—by products of something else
Propositional knowledge hypothesis
-knowledge about world is stored in memory in forms of propositions
Aphantasia
-when a person does not experience mental imagery
Imagery debate
-analog vs propositional code
-perception vs language
Analog perspective
-mental images stored as an analog code
—create a mental image of object that closely resembles actual perceptual image on your retina
-responses to mental images are frequently similar to responses to physical objects
—people often fail to notice precise details when looking at an object
—tf, these details will also e missing from their mental images
Propositional perspective
-mental images stored in an abstract language like form that does not physically resemble the original stimulus
Mental rotation supports analog coding
-takes longer to perform large rotation than a small one
—activating visual properties of the objects
-propositional code would predict similar time for these conditions
Embodied cognition
-role of cognition is to facilitate successful interactions with the environment
—genberg, 1997
Start of David
Is there a parallelogram embedded in figure?
-the effect of ambiguous visual images is difficult for analog accounts to accomodate
Imagery and the brain
-verbal activity is predominantly processed in left hemisphere while imagery is processed in the right
—this lateralization is related to handedness
Fieback & Friedericis fMRI study
-concrete and abstract words both elicited different patterns of activity in the left hemisphere
—however, concrete words do not elicit heightened activity in right hemisphere
Kosslyn (2004)
-visual imagery activates almost 90% of same brain regions that are activated during visual perception
—brain damage in the most basic regions of visual cortex leads to parallel problems in both visual perception and imagery
Prosopagnosia
People cannot use mental imagery to distinguish between faces
