Mental Imagery Flashcards
Epiphenomenon
A mental experience that doesn’t have any functional role in information processing.
(Pylyshyn, 1973)
Mental Rotation
The cognitive ability to mentally manipulate and rotate mental representations of objects/shapes in the mind without physically moving them.
Mental Imagery (broadly)
The processing of perceptual-like information in the absence of an external source for the perceptual information.
Where does the brain show activation during verbal imagery?
- Pre-frontal cortex near Broca’s area and in the parietal-temporal region of the posterior cortex near Wernicke’s area.
Where does the brain show activation during visual imagery?
- Parietal cortex, occipital cortex, and temporal cortex.
What do experiments like Brook’s (1968) ‘F task’ illustrate?
- Spatial tasks interfere with mentally scanning an object (think serial bottlenecks).
|(serial bottlenecks: CH. 3, “Cognitive Psychology and its Implications”)
Cerebral Areas Involved in Mental Rotation
- Across studies: parietal lobe active during rotation tasks
- Some tasks also require other regions fx. motorcortex when producing a mental image of a rotating hand (Kosslyn et al., 1998)
Mental Comparison of Magnitudes
People experience greater difficulty in judging the relative size of two objects / of 2 mental images as similarity in size increases.
Visual Perception vs Visual Imagery
- Visual perception involves some low-level processing
- Visual imagery involves some high-level processing.
Finke, Pinker, and Farah (1989)
- Participants asked to create mental image in their head, followed by a series of transformations of those mental images.
- Results: illustrates important function of visual imagery i.e. ability to create mental images and inspect them
fx. letter D rotated 90° to left + attached to letter ‘J’
route maps vs. survey maps
While route maps consist of a series of directions that were remembered (e.g. turn left than turn right at the next traffic light), survey maps contain spatial information about the environment which one can use to navigate.
Are route maps egocentric or allocentric?
Egocentric
Are survey maps egocentric or allocentric
Allocentric
What part of the brain is especially important for egocentric representation of space?
The parietal lobe
What part of the brain is especially important for allocentric representation of space?
The hippocampus
What does the activation of the fusiform face area or the parahippocampal place area during mental imagery illustrate?
It illustrates the correlation between imagery and perception. The FFA shows activation when imagining faces, the PPA when imagining places. The same is true for perceiving faces and places.
How is VVIQ correlated with ability to mentally solve spatial tasks such as the Shephard or Brooks task?
There’s no clear correlation
Is the primary visual cortex involved in visual imagery?
This is unclear, about half of studies suggest that it is, while the other half only find activation in later parts of the visual system.
How are spatial and visual imagery skills correlated?
Some studies suggest negative correlation, and the general pattern is that they are two independent skills.
Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)
Questionnaire developed by British psychologist David Marks in 1973, it has been widely used as a measure of individual differences in vividness of visual imagery.
