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.