Ch. 10 Cog Psych

Spatial imagery refers

-The ability to image spatial relations -such as the layout of a garden

Where are imagery neurons located?

Brain

Mental imagery involves

experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of sensory input

The scanning task used by Kosslyn involves

mental images

Spatial imagers did better in the

mental rotation task, and object imagers did better on the degraded pictures task

unilateral neglect

-A problem caused by brain damage, usually to the right parietal lobe, in which the patient ignores objects in the left half of his or her visual field -even to the extent of shaving just one side of his face or eating only the food on one side of her plate

Patient M.G.S.

-Before surgery, she imagined walking toward an animal and estimated how close she was when the image began to overflow her visual field, and she said 15 ft -But when Farah had her repeat this task after her right occipital lobe had been removed, the distance increased to 35 feet. -This result supports the idea that the visual cortex is important for imagery

Imagery debate

-The debate about whether imagery is based on spatial mechanisms, such as those involved in perception, or on propositional mechanisms that are related to language.

Which researcher was MOST interested in mental scanning?

Kosslyn

The conceptual peg hypothesis would predict enhanced memory for which word pair?

Cake mug

Epiphenomenon

-A phenomenon that accompanies a mechanism but is not actually part of the mechanism. An example of an epiphenomenon is lights that flash on a mainframe computer as it operates. -The spatial experience of mental images

When performing a mental scan of an image of a boat that includes an anchor on the far right, the motor on the far left, and a window in between, it will take someone longest to identify whether which object is present?

The anchor when beginning at the motor

The "imagery debate" is concerned with whether imagery

is based on spatial or language mechanisms.

pegword technique

-A method for remembering things in which the things to be remembered are associated with concrete words involves imagery, as in the method of loci, but instead of visualizing items in different locations, you associate them with concrete words. -The first step is to create a list of nouns, like the following: one-bun; two-shoe; three-tree; four-door -It's easy to remember these words in order because they were created by rhyming them with the numbers. Also, the rhyming provides a retrieval cue that helps remember each word. -The next step is to pair each of the things to be remembered with a pegword by creating a vivid image of your item-to-be-remembered together with the object represented by the word.

method of loci

-A method for remembering things in which the things to be remembered are placed at different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout -Placing images at locations can help with retrieving memories later

Kosslyn: Mental Scanning

-A process of mental imagery in which a person scans a mental image in his or her mind. -asked participants to memorize a picture of an object, and then to create an image of that object in their mind and to focus on one part of the boat, such as the anchor. They were then asked to look for another part of the boat, such as the motor, and to press the "true" button when they found this part or the "false" button when they couldn't find it. -Participants were also told to imagine an island that contained seven different locations -it took longer to scan between greater distances on the image, a result that supports the idea that visual imagery is spatial in nature

spatial representations

-A representation in which different parts of an image can be described as corresponding to specific locations in space -just because we experience imagery as spatial, that doesn't mean that the underlying representation is spatial.

Shepard and Jacqueline: Mental chronometry

-mental chronometry= Determining the amount of time needed to carry out a cognitive task -participants were mentally rotating one of the views of a 3d block to see whether it matched the other one -one of the first to apply quantitative methods to the study of imagery and to suggest that imagery and perception may share the same mechanisms -

Visual imagery

-seeing in the absence of a visual stimulus -Ex: the soft, shiny sand -using all of your senses to infer something

Allan Paivio: Conceptual peg hypothesis

-showed that it was easier to remember concrete nouns, like truck or tree, that can be imaged than it is to remember abstract nouns, like truth or justice, that are difficult to image -conceptual peg hypothesis= A hypothesis, associated with Paivio's dual coding theory, that states that concrete nouns create images that other words can hang on to, which enhances memory for these words -one-bun; two-shoe; three-tree; four-door

A mental rotation task is focused on which aspect of imagery?

Spatial

Mental scanning experiments found

a direct relationship between scanning time and distance on the image

paired-associate learning

given a pair of words, then given just the word and told to say it's pair

mental walk task

-A task used in imagery experiments in which participants are asked to form a mental image of an object and to imagine that they are walking toward this mental image. -The task was to estimate how far away they were from the animal when they began to experience "overflow"—when the image filled the visual field or when its edges started becoming fuzzy -The result was that participants had to move closer for small animals (less than a foot away for a mouse) than for larger animals -provides further evidence for the idea that images are spatial, just like perception.

vividness of visual imagery questionnaire (VVIQ)

-A test in which people are asked to rate the vividness of mental images they create. This test is designed to measure object imagery ability -Participants rated, on a 5-point scale, the vividness of mental images they were asked to create. A typical item: "The sun is rising above the horizon into a hazy sky -participants with a low score on the PFT (low spatial imagery) and participants with a high score (high spatial imagery)

depictive representations

-Corresponds to spatial representation. So-called because a spatial representation can be depicted by a picture -Spatial representations such as the picture of the cat under the table in which parts of the representation correspond to parts of the object

topographic map

-Each point on a visual stimulus causes activity at a specific location on a brain structure, such as the visual cortex, and points next to each other on the stimulus cause activity at points next to each other on the structure. -looking at a small object causes activity in the back of the visual cortex and looking at larger objects causes activity to spread toward the front of the visual cortex -when participants created small visual images, activity was centered near the back of the brain, but as the size of the mental image increased, activation moved toward the front of the visual cortex, just as it does for perception. -Thus, both imagery and perception result in topographically organized brain activation -perception and imagery both activate the same areas in the frontal lobe -perception activates much more of visual cortex in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain than does imagery -visual images are more fragile than real perception, and this deactivation helps quiet down irrelevant activity that might interfere with the mental image

Inconsistencies among studies highlights the difficulty in interpreting neuropsychological results

-Ex: Guariglia= Ok perception, but has unilateral neglect (so bad visual imagery) -Ex: Behrmann = Poor perception. Visual agnosia so can't recognize objects, but Can draw objects from memory.

Difference between perception and mental imagery

-For example, perception occurs automatically when we look at something, but imagery needs to be generated with some effort. -Also, perception is stable—it continues as long as you are observing a stimulus—but imagery is fragile—it can vanish without continued effort -it is harder to manipulate mental images than images that are created perceptually. Ex:rabbit vs. duck image

Size in Visual Field

-Kosslyn (1978) asked participants to imagine two animals, such as an elephant and a rabbit, next to each other and to imagine that they were standing close enough so that the larger animal filled most of their visual field. He then asked questions about the rabbit. Then, he did the same thing but with a fly and a rabbit -that participants answered questions about the rabbit more rapidly when it filled more of the visual field

Multivoxel Pattern Analysis

-Matthew Johnson and Marcia Johnson (2014) used this procedure to study the relation between imagery and perception by training a classifier by presenting four different kinds of scenes—beach, desert, field, or house—to a person in a scanner -the classifier predicted the correct picture on 63 percent of the trials, which is above chance accuracy -the classifier could use the information it had learned during perception training to predict what the participant was seeing

Imagery Neurons

-Neurons in the human brain studied by Kreiman, which fire in the same way when a person sees a picture of an object and when a person creates a visual image of the object (brain firing is same if you see image vs. if you imagine it) -Ex: imagining a baseball vs. a face -supports the idea of a close relation between perception and imagery

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

-Stephen Kosslyn and coworkers (1999) presented transcranial magnetic stimulation to the visual cortex while participants were carrying out either a perception task or an imagery task -asked to make a judgment about the stripes in two of the quadrants -but instead of actually looking at the stripes while answering the questions, the participants closed their eyes and based their judgments on their mental image of the display -stimulation caused participants to respond more slowly, and that this slowing effect occurred both for perception and for imagery

Object imagery refers

-The ability to image visual details, features, or objects -such as a rose bush with bright red roses in the garden

Imageless thought debate

-The debate about whether thought is possible in the absence of images -Wundt proposed that because images accompany thought, studying images was a way of studying thinking. -Francis Galton observed that people who had great difficulty forming visual images were still quite capable of thinking -Watson and behaviorists thought it was a waste of time bc you can't see mental imagery

both perception and imagery activate the visual cortex

-activity in the striate cortex increased both when a person observed presentations of actual visual stimuli and when the person was imagining the stimulus -asking participants to think about questions that involved imagery—for example, "Is the green of the trees darker than the green of the grass?"—generated a greater response in the visual cortex than asking nonimagery questions

Chaves Perky

-asked her participants to "project" visual images of common objects onto a screen and then to describe these images. Unbeknownst to the participants, Perky was back-projecting a very dim image of this object onto the screen. Thus, when participants were asked to create an image of a banana, Perky projected a dim image of a banana onto the screen -not one of Perky's 24 participants noticed that there was an actual picture on the screen. They had apparently mistaken an actual picture for a mental image

The idea that imagery and perception may share the same mechanisms is based on

-the observation that although mental images differ from perception in that they are not as vivid or long lasting, imagery shares many properties with perception -both involve spatial representation of the stimulus

Mental imagery

-using minds eye -Experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of sensory input -broader term that refers to the ability to re-create the sensory world in the absence of physical stimuli -when you are able to recall past experiences

Zenon Pylyshyn: Propositional Representation

-using spoken language to imagine scenes in your mind -A representation in which relationships are represented by symbols, as when the words of a language represent objects and the relationships between objects. -representations in which relationships can be represented by abstract symbols, such as an equation, or a statement, such as "The cat is under the table." -Guess what I saw at Walmart!

degraded pictures task

A task in which a line drawing is degraded by omitting parts of the drawing and obscuring it with a visual noise pattern. The person's task is to identify the object

mental rotation task

A task in which a person judges whether two pictures of three-dimensional geometric objects are pictures of the same object rotated in space or are pictures of two mirror-image objects rotated in space.

paper folding test (PFT)

A test in which a piece of paper is folded and then pierced by a pencil to create a hole. The task is to determine, from a number of alternatives, where the holes will be on the unfolded piece of paper.

When tasked with identifying which word completes the blank in an example such as "bear-cub" and shown only "bear - _____," which technique is used?

Paired-associate