Mental Imagery

Question 1

Epiphenomenon

Answer 1

A mental experience that doesn’t have any functional role in information processing.

(Pylyshyn, 1973)

Question 2

Mental Rotation

Answer 2

The cognitive ability to mentally manipulate and rotate mental representations of objects/shapes in the mind without physically moving them.

Question 3

Mental Imagery (broadly)

Answer 3

The processing of perceptual-like information in the absence of an external source for the perceptual information.

Question 4

Where does the brain show activation during verbal imagery?

Answer 4

• Pre-frontal cortex near Broca’s area and in the parietal-temporal region of the posterior cortex near Wernicke’s area.

Question 5

Where does the brain show activation during visual imagery?

Answer 5

• Parietal cortex, occipital cortex, and temporal cortex.

Question 6

What do experiments like Brook’s (1968) ‘F task’ illustrate?

Answer 6

• Spatial tasks interfere with mentally scanning an object (think serial bottlenecks).

|(serial bottlenecks: CH. 3, “Cognitive Psychology and its Implications”)

Question 7

Cerebral Areas Involved in Mental Rotation

Answer 7

• 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)

Question 8

Mental Comparison of Magnitudes

Answer 8

People experience greater difficulty in judging the relative size of two objects / of 2 mental images as similarity in size increases.

Question 9

Visual Perception vs Visual Imagery

Answer 9

• Visual perception involves some low-level processing
• Visual imagery involves some high-level processing.

Question 10

Finke, Pinker, and Farah (1989)

Answer 10

• 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’

Question 10

route maps vs. survey maps

Answer 10

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.

Question 10

Are route maps egocentric or allocentric?

Answer 10

Egocentric

Question 11

Are survey maps egocentric or allocentric

Answer 11

Allocentric

Question 12

What part of the brain is especially important for egocentric representation of space?

Answer 12

The parietal lobe

Question 13

What part of the brain is especially important for allocentric representation of space?

Answer 13

The hippocampus

Question 14

What does the activation of the fusiform face area or the parahippocampal place area during mental imagery illustrate?

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

How is VVIQ correlated with ability to mentally solve spatial tasks such as the Shephard or Brooks task?

Answer 15

There’s no clear correlation

Question 16

Is the primary visual cortex involved in visual imagery?

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

How are spatial and visual imagery skills correlated?

Answer 17

Some studies suggest negative correlation, and the general pattern is that they are two independent skills.

Question 18

Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)

Answer 18

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.