Visual Imagery Flashcards
What us a chronometric study
Measures how long it takes people to complete mental tasks involving imagery i.e imagining the distance between two points on a map or mentally rotating objects
Chronometric Study: Kosslyn’s Island Map (Kosslyn, 1983)
What was the method?
Participants were asked to imagine traveling between points on a map.
Chronometric Study: Kosslyn’s Island Map (Kosslyn, 1983)
What were the results?
Reveled mental images are constrained by real-world spatial limits. Showed the time it took to imagine moving between points correlated with the actual physical distance.
Chronometric Study: Kosslyn’s Island Map (Kosslyn, 1983)
What did the graph show?
There is a linear relationship between the physical distance on the map and the time it took participants to mentally travel between landmarks.
Chronometric Study: Kosslyn’s Island Map (Kosslyn, 1983)
Importance of Results?
Supports there is a pictorial mental imagery, provides insights on how the brain processes mental imagery and spatial information.
Chronometric Study: Mental Rotation (Shepard & Metzler, 1971)
What was the method?
Participants mentally rotate objects to determine if they are the same or different.
Chronometric Study: Mental Rotation (Shepard & Metzler, 1971)
What were the results?
The greater the degree of rotation, the longer it took to make the judgement, showing that mental imagery works similarly to physical perception.
Chronometric Study: Mental Rotation (Shepard & Metzler, 1971)
What does the graph show?
Shows a linear relationship between the angle of rotation and the reaction time, mental processing time increases at a constant rate.
Chronometric Study: Mental Rotation (Shepard & Metzler, 1971)
Importance of Results?
Demonstrates that people mentally rotate objects in a way that is consistent with physical rotation.
Chronometric Study: Arrow Task (Finke & Pinker, 1982)
What was the method?
Participants had to remember where a dot had been located relative to an arrow.
Chronometric Study: Arrow Task (Finke & Pinker, 1982)
What were the results?
The farther the dot was from the arrow, the longer the response time. Showing that mental imagery operates like physical perception.
Chronometric Study: Arrow Task (Finke & Pinker, 1982)
Importance of Results?
Supports. the idea the people use spatial representations in their mind, participants mentally “scanned” the space between the arrow and the remembered location of the dots, even when not asked to do so.
Explain Variable Focus of Attention on an Image
Zooming in or out of mental images, judgments are faster when image is larger. Rabbit vs a fly, you can imagine the rabbit being bigger next to the fly, with probably more detail.
What do we learn from time studies?
Visual imagery engages the same brain areas involved in perception. Imagery isn’t just a byproduct of cognition it plays an active role in how we process and recall information. Understanding this can influence how we understand how mental images influence tasks like problem-solving, or memory. Understanding visual imagery can also help us provide insight on conditions like unilateral neglect.
How do we know that the brain areas involved in visual perception are also involved in visual imagery?
Activity: Perception>Imagery (O’Craven & Kanwisher (2000)
Brain areas involved in visual perception, like the FFA (faces) and PPA (places) are also activated when imagining images, supporting the idea that visual imagery uses the similar neural pathways as actual sight.
What is Unilateral Neglect?
Unable to pay attention to something that is on one side of a person’s view which affects their mental imagery.
Piazza del Duomo in Milan (Bisiach & Luzzatti, 1978)
What was the method of this study?
Participants were made to stand in the plaza to observe their surroundings, then when taken out were asked to explain what they saw.
Piazza del Duomo in Milan (Bisiach & Luzzatti, 1978)
What were the results of this study?
People who faced forward could not see what was on the left side of them because they had unilateral neglect. If they faces backward they also could not see on their left side, but now saw that they didn’t before because they can see out of their right side.
What is the pictures (Imagery) vs. Propositions debate?
Kosslyn argued that we can use mental images (like pictures in our head) to aid cognition, while Pylyshyn believed cognition is based on propositional thinking, and images are just a side effect (epiphenomenal). Kosslyn’s position is supported by studies like the Arrow Task and brain imaging data.
What are Malleable Images?
Cognitive maps: where people think things tend to be so they make generalizations that tend to be off/distorted.
Effects of Verbal Labels (Carmichael, Hogan & Walters (1932))
What is it?
Labels change what we think images are, if you see two circles and a line you can see them as glasses or a dumbbell but if they’re labeled you are persuaded to see it as the label.
Boundary Extension
What is it?
When asked to remember an image, people remember the image with a wider or broader angle, the image has a bigger border than first presented with. People tend to remember things with a wider view.
Boundary Extension
Explain the results of the park et al brain activity study.
We are storing a wide view of photos. The study tracks brain activity when participants are shown images and asked to recall the. The level of brain activity can reveal whether the brain is treating an image as “new” or “familiar”. When the same picture is shown with no boundary extension or zooming, the brain registers it as the same (attenuation). When people are shown a close-up image and later recall it their brain often shows a response consistent with recalling a wider view (boundary extension).
