Imagery

Analogical Representation

Basis of all thinking is knowledge. Knowledge consists of mental representations of the world and our experiences with the world. 2 types of representations under tis umbrella are symbolic and analogical. Human thought uses both.(mental images can be this type of representation)

Symbolic Representation of Concepts

Can be literal (dog) or abstract (length). These are the building blocks of symbolic knowledge.

Symbolic Representation

Consists of concepts that can be literal or abstract (like dog or length) or it could consists of propositions (relationship between noun and predicate)

Kosslyn's(1976) study of mental images

Kosslyn (1976) asked participants to answer yes/no questions about their mental images. If participants imagined a cat, they were faster to confirm that cats have heads, compared to confirming that cats have claws. The reverse was true if the participants were asked to think about cats, not to imagine them. This suggests that as the mode of representation changes, so does the pattern of information availability.

Image Scanning

Kosslyn et al. (1978) first asked participants to memorize this map. They were then asked to mentally scan from one landmark to another on the imagined map. The time it took to scan the image corresponded to the distance on the map. Thus, mental images seem to preserve the spatial layout and geometry of the represented scene.

Conceptual-Peg Hypothesis

Paivio (1986) 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. Paivio (1963, 1965) found that memory for pairs of concrete nouns is much better than memory for pairs of abstract nouns. To explain this result, Paivio proposed that concrete nouns create images that other words can "hang onto." (For example, if presenting the pair boat-hat creates an image of a boat, then presenting the word boat later will bring back the boat image, which provides a number of places on which subjects can place the hat in their mind)

Dual-code theory

Paivio (1986) was the first to formalize the theory that there seemed to be two types of representations: visual imagery (analogues) and verbal codes (symbols)

Symbolic Representation of Propositions

Relationships between a noun and a predicate (The complete subject tells whom or what the sentence is about. ex. Solomon loves frogs).

Mental-Rotation tasks

This experiment suggest that mental images preserve spatial information in three dimensions. Subjects needed to identify in each pair, if the objects were identical, despite being viewed from different perspectives. The data from this task suggest that the greater the angle of rotation between the two pictures, the longer the response time. The participants have to go back in their brain an visually rotate the mental images of the two objects into alignment.

Image Scaling

With these observations about perception in mind, Kosslyn wondered whether this relationship between viewing distance and the ability to perceive details also occurs for mental images. To answer this question, Kosslyn (1978) asked subjects to imagine two animals, such as an elephant and a rabbit, next to each other and to imagine that they were standing close enough to the larger animal that it filled most of their visual field. He then posed questions such as "Does the rabbit have whiskers?" and asked his subjects to find that part of the animal in their mental image and to answer as quickly as possible. When he repeated this procedure but told subjects to imagine a rabbit and a fly next to each other, subjects created larger images of the rabbit. The result of these experiments, shown alongside the pictures, was that subjects answered questions about the rabbit more rapidly when it filled more of the visual field.

Chronometric studies

measure the amount of time required by a cognitive process of interest