Visual Imagery Flashcards
Define visual imagery.
Seeing in the absence of visual stimulus.
Define mental imagery.
The ability to recreate the sensory world in the absence of physical stimuli.
Who proposed that images were one of the three basic elements of consciousness?
Wundt.
Name Wundt’s three basic elements of consciousness.
Images, sensations and feelings.
What is the imageless thought debate?
Created due to the idea that imagery and thinking are linked, and based on Aristotle’s idea “thought is impossible without an image” though other psychologists contend this and say the opposite.
What supports the idea that imagery is not required for thinking?
Galton’s observation that people who have great difficulty forming visual images are still capable of thinking.
What did behaviourists find the study of imagery unproductive?
Because visual images are invisible to everyone except the person experiencing them.
How did Watson, the founder of behaviourism, see images? (2)
Mythological and unproven.
What did Paivio show were easier to remember, and how does this support visual imagery?
Concrete nouns that can be imaged are easier to remember than abstract concepts, like truth or justice.
What technique did Paivio use?
Paired-associate learning.
What occurs in paired associate learning?
Subjects are presented with pairs of words during a study period. The first of the word pair is then presented to them in the test period, and they must recall the word that it was paired with.
Who proposed the conceptual peg hypothesis?
Paivio.
What is the conceptual peg hypothesis, and what is it used to explain?
Concrete nouns create images that other words can hang on to, which explain’s Paivio’s finding that concrete nouns are easier to remember and visualise than abstract concepts.
Who used mental chronometry to infer cognitive processes? (2)
Shepard and Metzler.
Define mental chronometry.
Determining the amount of time needed to carry out various cognitive tasks.
What is important about Shepard and Metzler’s experiment? (2)
It was one of the first to apply quantitative methods to visual imagery and to suggest that imagery and perception may share mechanisms.
What do mental and perceptual images both involve?
Spatial representation of the stimulus.
What is mental scanning?
A task where subjects create mental images and then scan them in their minds.
How did Lea explain the results of Kosslyn’s mental scanning experiment?
As subjects scanned, they may have encountered other interesting parts, and the distraction could have increased reaction time.
What did Kosslyn hypothesise about the results of his mental scanning experiment, and was this true?
He reasoned that if imagery was spatial, then it should take longer for subjects to find parts of an image that are located farther from the initial point of focus, which was supported by his results.
What is the imagery debate?
A debate about whether imagery is based on spatial mechanisms, like those in perception, or mechanisms related to language, called propositional mechanisms.
What is spatial representation?
A representation in which different parts of n image can be described as corresponding to specific locations in space.
Why did Pylyshyn disagree with Kosslyn’s findings that imagery involves spatial representation?
Pylyshyn thought that just because we experiences the imagery as spatial, that doesn’t mean that the underlying representation is spatial.
What did Pylyshyn argue the spatial experience of mental images is?
An epiphenomenon.
Define epiphenomenon.
Something that accompanies the real mechanism but is not actually part of the mechanism.
Pylyshyn proposed that the underlying mechanism of mental imagery is:
Propositional.
What is a propositional representation?
One where relationships can be represented as abstract symbols.
What is a depictive representation?
A representation that is like a realistic picture of the object, so that parts of the representation correspond to parts of the object.
What do propositional networks act very similarly to?
Semantic networks.
What is the tacit knowledge explanation?
Subjects unconsciously use knowledge about the world in making their judgements.
What is a mental walk task?
Subjects imagine themselves walking towards a mental image.
How did Perky find the interaction between perception and imagery?
She asked participants to imagine an image projected onto a screen, while she projected a dim image of the object onto it. Not one participants realised that the image was real and not a mental projection.
Why did Farah believe we couldn’t rule out Pylyshyn’s tacit knowledge explanation?
Subjects can be influenced by past experiences with perception, and so could unknowingly be simulating perceptual responses in imagery experiments.
What did Farah suggest we do to rule out the tacit knowledge explanation?
Investigate how the brain responds to visual imagery.