Week 8

Question 1

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Who is the psychologist who argued that visual imagery is an epiphenomenon ?

Answer 1

Zenon Pylyshyn

Question 2

What is the name of the researcher who used two behavioural tasks ?

Answer 2

Stephen Kosslyn

Question 3

What were Kosslyn’s behavioural tasks ?

Answer 3

1. Mental Scanning
2. Size in Visual Field

Question 4

What was the Mental scanning task ?

Answer 4

• Given time to memorize island -> certain landmarks and then the map disappears
• Participants are then asked to travel along the map based on the landmarks : “imagine you are at the well and travel to the tree”
• Mentally have to travel to the tree and click button
• Every trial -> starting point and ending point changes
• Found that when the landmarks were closer, participants travel mentally a lot faster so it takes them less time but if it took them longer to mentally travel from the starting point to the end point it took them more time
• Imagery is the same as how we perceive things

Question 5

What was the Size in Visual Field task ?

Answer 5

• Mental Walk Task
  □ Imagine walking towards the car, the car gets bigger; Same as the real world
• Imagery seems to function in a similar way as perception
• Farther away - smaller; Closer - gets bigger as it takes up more of our visual field
• Property of images -> properties of visual field

Question 6

What are the 3 pieces of nueroimaging/neuropsychological evidence showing that imagery and percetion are closely related to one another ?

Answer 6

• single cell recording - lower temporal lobe; stimulate neuron until person says they can see faces (fusiform cortex); imagenary neurons fire in the same way whether you see something or imagine it
• Brain imaging - fMRI -> shows pictures of things or asked to imagine things; Occiptial lobe highly active - V.C
• TMS - lets you not imagine things (interupts mental processing); stimulate part of the brain (V.C) and asked questions about it in which people were slower to make judgement even if they saw an image or were asked to imagine

Question 7

What is the method of loci ?

Answer 7

A method used to memorize large amounts of information by using a location or space to memorize individual pieces of things/objects by mapping out a path and placing (mental image) the thing/object in a certain location and memorize each object being there by going through each location and creating a path

Question 8

How is the method of loci similar and different to the peg-word method for using imagery to support memory ?

Answer 8

• Similar- have to create something to memorize it and have to make associations
• Different - peg-word method you have to create something new everytime you want to memorize something but you don’t have to do that for loci since you can use the same path again and associations are made with words in the peg-word method and not locations

Question 9

Does mental practice benefit athletic performance? What about academic performance ?

Answer 9

It does !
* Athletic performance - most athletes say that they became really good at their sport since the imagine themselves practiving; research also shows that participants who got additional training and image based training performed better than the other groups
* Academic - Shelly Taylor conducted an experiment in students taking a course and she found that people who were engaged in process stimulation (imagining what you need to do to acheive good grade) performed better than the control and outcome group (imagining moment you get grade). This is because students became better at planning when they’re going to do the things they need to achieve the grade they desired.

Question 10

How does Imagination help people to be less impulsive ?

Answer 10

• fianancial spending - temporal discounting; if you gave peple a moment to imagine what they can use the money for causes their shift to change which causes them to reflect on their decision