Chapter 7- Mental Imagery and Cognitive Maps
Experimenter Expectancy
In research, when researchers' biases and expectations influence the outcomes of an experiment.
Pitch
a characteristic of a sound stimulus that can be arranged on a scale from low to high.
Heuristic
a general rule or problem-solving strategy that usually produces a correct solution; however, it can sometimes lead to cognitive errors.
Meta-analysis
a statistical method for combining numerous studies on a single topic. A meta-analysis computes a statistical index (known as effect size, or d) that tells us whether a particular variable has a statically significant effect, when combining all the studies.
Imagery Debate
an important controversy: Do mental images resemble perception (using an analog code), or do they resemble language (using a propositional code)?
Demand Characteristics
cues that might convey the experimenter's hypothesis to a participant in a research study.
Landmark Effect
in cognitive maps, people tend to provide shorter distance estimates when traveling to a landmark--an important geographical location--rather than a non landmark.
Rotation Heuristic
in cognitive maps, people tend to remember a figure that is slightly tilted as being either more vertical or more horizontal than it really is.
Symmetry Heuristic
in cognitive maps, people tend to remember figures as being more symmetrical and regular than they truly are.
Border Bias
in cognitive maps, the finding that people tend to estimate that the distance between two locations---on different sides of a geographic border---are larger than two locations that are the same distance apart, but not the same side of a geographic border.
Alignment Heuristic
in cognitive maps, the finding that people tend to remember a series of separate geographical structures as being more lined up than they really are.
Propositional Code
in the imagery debate an abstract, language-like representation. This form of storage ins neither visual nor spatial, and it does not physically resemble the original stimulus.
Analog Code
in the imagery debate, a mental representation that closely resembles the physical object.
STEM Disciplines
the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics; spatial ability is especially important in these disciplines.
Prosopagnosia
the inability to recognize human faces visually, though other objects may be perceived relatively normally. People with this also have comparable problems in creating visual imagery for faces.
Spatial Cognition
the mental processes involved in (1) thoughts about cognitive maps, (2) memory for the world that we navigate, and (3) keeping track of objects in a spatial array.
Auditory Imagery
the mental representation of auditory stimuli (sounds) when the sounds are not physically present.
Cognitive Map
the mental representation of geographical information, including a person's surrounding environment.
Mental Imagery
the mental representation of stimuli when those stimuli are not physically present. Sensory receptors do not receive any input when mental image is created.
Visual Imagery
the mental representation of visual stimuli.
Situated Cognition Approach
the proposal that a person makes use of information in the immediate environment or situation; thus, knowledge typically depends on the context surrounding the person.
Spatial Framework Model
the proposal that the above-below spatial dimensions is especially important in spatial imagery, the front-back dimensions is moderately important, and the right-left dimension is least important.
Timbre
the sound quality of a tone.
Perception
the use of previous knowledge to gather and interpret stimuli registered by the sense. Perception requires both bottom-up and top-down processing.
90- degree- angle heuristic
they represent angles in a mental map as being closer to 90 degrees than they really are.