Mental imagery Flashcards
What is mental imagery?
The ability to form mental representations of objects, scenes, or events that are not currently present to the senses
What is Epiphenomenon?
Mental experience that happens as a side effect, without affecting the main process
What is mental rotation?
The ability to imagine turning or rotating an object in your mind, like picturing how a letter would look if it were flipped or turned (spatial task)
Visual images vs visual perception?
Visual images are mental pictures we create in our minds, like imagining a beach, while visual perception is how we process and interpret the sights we see in the real world, like recognizing a beach when we actually see one
Verbal imagery vs visual imagery?
Verbal imagery refers to imagining words or language in your mind. Visual imagery involves picturing images or scenes in your mind
What is a cognitive map?
Mental representations of physical spaces or environments
What is a route map?
Detailed, step-by-step guides of a specific path, showing directions for how to get from one place to another
What is a survey map?
Broader and show a larger area with a more abstract, bird’s-eye view of locations and their relationships to each other
What is analog representation?
Mentally representing something that looks or feels like the real thing
What is Propositional Representation?
Mentally representing information using symbols or abstract ideas, like thinking of a tree as “the tree is tall.” It doesn’t look like the actual tree, but represents it through meaning
What is egocentric representation?
When we think about the world from our own perspective, focusing on how objects are located relative to us (“the chair is in front of me”)
What is Allocentric representation?
when we think about the world from an objective viewpoint, focusing on the location of objects relative to each other (“the chair is next to the table”)
What is Image Scanning?
Refers to the mental process of moving attention across a mental image, similar to how we would scan a real image or scene with our eyes. For example, when you imagine a familiar place and mentally “look around” or explore different parts of it
What is Dual-Coding Theory?
We remember things better when we use both verbal codes (words) and visual codes (pictures) to represent them
Describe the brain areas in mental imagery
Parietal lobe for spatial processing (mental rotation (“where”-pathway))
The temporal lobe for the visual aspects and memory of visualizations.
Prefrontal lobe: Directs and organizes mental imagery in working memory
Fusiform gyrus: face recognition
Parahippocampal: space recognition
Occipital lobe: Generates and processes visual details (shapes, colors)
What is the mental rotation experiment by Shepard and Metzler?
The study investigated how people mentally rotate 3-D objects to determine if two objects are identical or mirrored images. The reaction time to identify whether two objects were the same increased linearly with the angular difference between the two objects. (The more the objects were rotated from each other, the longer it took for participants to make a decision)
What is serial processing vs parallel processing?
Serial processing is when tasks are done one at a time, step by step. (can’t listen to two people at the same time)
Parallel processing is when multiple tasks are done at the same time (looking at one person while listening to someone else)
What did Roland and Friberg found?
When people process verbal imagery or visual imagery, some of the same brain areas are active as when they process actual speech or visual information
Explain the experiment by Santa with shapes and words
Our brains seem to remember shapes better when they match the way we originally saw them (in this case, the triangle).
Words, on the other hand, are usually remembered in a straight line (like reading a list).
So, when participants could use mental pictures of the shapes, they were faster at making decisions
Explain the experiment by Brooks with visual scanning of an image
Participants were asked to imagine a capital letter ‘F’ and mentally scan it from top to bottom. They were then asked to classify each corner as either ‘normal’ or ‘not normal’.
In this experiment, participants had to answer in three different ways: speaking, tapping their fingers, and scanning a paper. The time it took for them to respond was measured.
The results showed that scanning a visual image in the mind interfered with scanning a piece of paper. This suggests there’s a “bottleneck” or limitation in the brain’s spatial area.
Pointing took way longer time
What did Chambers and Reisberg find about the rabbit-duck image?
Rabbit-duck image. You cannot interpret the image as a rabbit and a duck at the same time, because this will result in a serial bottleneck
What did O’Craven and Kanwisher find about face and place recognition?
The brain’s processing of faces versus places: Fusiform Gyrus and Parahippocampal
What did Moyer find about mentally comparing sizes?
Explored how people mentally compare the sizes of objects: the time it took for people to make a size comparison was influenced by how similar the objects were in size
What did Baddeley and Lieberman find about a dual-task scenario?
In this study, participants were asked to perform two tasks at the same time (a dual-task scenario): Image scanning task: Participants were asked to imagine a visual scene or object and mentally “scan” across it and Verbal task: At the same time, they had to perform a task that required verbal processing.
Participants experienced interference when they had to perform both tasks simultaneously. The image scanning task and the verbal task both relied on the same cognitive resources (“cognitive bottlenecks”)
What did Kosslyn et al. find about mental images?
Investigate how people mentally visualize objects and whether their mental images resemble actual visual perception.
They found that the time it takes to scan a mental image of an object is related to the size of the object. In other words, when participants imagined a large object (like an elephant), it took them longer to mentally “scan” the image than when they imagined a smaller object (like a rabbit)
What did Gunzelman and Anderson find about map rotation?
People will often rotate a physical map so it is oriented ro correspond to their point of view.
How does mental imagery relate to other topics?
