Chapter 7: Mental Imagery and Cognitive Maps

Mental Imagery

It is also called as Imagery

Mental Imagery

It refers to the mental representation of stimuli when those stimuli are not physically present in the environment

Auditory Imagery

It refers to the mental representation of auditory stimuli

Clinical Psychology

Mental Imagery is also important in the ______ setting

Spatial Ability

It is extremely important in the STEM disciplines

Albert Einstein

He relied on spatial images rather than verbal descriptions in his thinking processes

Nora Newcombe

Psychologist _______ suggests methods for enhancing young children’s spatial skills, such as mentally rotating images

Perception

It involves registering sensory information and processing it until an internal representation of the stimulus arises

Mental Imagery

It relies on information and processing it until an internal representation of the stimulus arises

Mental Imagery

It is often associated with creativity and imagination, and are necessary for tasks like visual search but are not a form of perception; rather, they are closely related to it

Wilhelm Wundt

He is often credited as the founder of psychology and considered imagery to be significant in the discipline

John B. Watson

Although Wundt promotes the use of imagery, _______ opposed research in this aspect as he stated that it couldn’t be linked to observable behavior

Introspective Reports

These may not always be accurate as individuals may not always have a conscious access to the processes associated with the mental imagery

Handedness

It can influence the mental rotation process of a person

Right-Handers

Studies showed that they recognize right hands faster than left hands

Left-Handers

Studies showed that they equally recognize both right and left hands.

Upright Pictures

Both right-handers and left-handers recognized these kinds of pictures more accurately than its opposite

Elderly Individuals

They typically perform more slowly on mental rotation tasks compared to younger people.

Deaf Individuals

They are fluent in American Sign Language, excelling at mentally rotating scenes by 180 degrees

Deaf Individuals

They frequently perform mental rotations of signs to match the perspective they would use when producing the sign, leading to enhanced proficiency in mental rotation tasks

Primary Motor Cortex

PET scans revealed that participants who physically rotated the figure showed activity in their _______ during subsequent mental rotation tasks

Right Frontal and Parietal Lobes

The standard instructions to rotate the figure activates the ___________.

Left Temporal Lobe and Parts of the Motor Cortex

Instructions to imagine rotating oneself to see the figure from a different perspective increase activity in the _______

Stroke Recovery

Research on mental rotation has practical implications for _______

Imagery Debate

It refers to an important controversy which asks the question “do our mental images resemble perception (analog code) or do they resemble language (propositional code)

Analog Code

It is where the majority of theorists believe that information about a mental image is stored in, serving as a representation that closely resembles the physical object

Analog Code

According to the ______ approach, mental imagery is closely related to perception

Propositional Code

It is an abstract, language-like representation where the storage is neither visual nor spatial, and it does not physically resemble the original stimulus

Propositional Code

According to the ______ approach, mental imagery is a close relative of language, not perception

Propositional Code

According to the _______ perspective, mental images are stored in an abstract, language-like form that does not physically resemble the original stimulus

Zenon Pylyshyn

He has been the strongest supporter of the propositional code, agreeing that people do experience mental images while also arguing that it would be awkward to store information in terms of mental images

Shepard and Metzler

Their pioneering work on mental rotation provides strong support for the analog perspectives

Geometric Figures

Research on ______ suggests that mental images are treated similarly to physical objects when rotated through space

Neuroimaging Research

It supports the analog perspective on mental imagery

Detailed Visual Imagery

Tasks requiring ______ activate the primary visual cortex, which is the same part of the cortex activated during perception of actual visual objects

Prosopagnosia

It is the term referred to people who cannot recognize human faces visually but perceive other objects normally

Brain Damage

_______ in the basic region of the visual cortex leads to parallel problems in both visual perception and visual imagery

Stephen Reed

His research challenged the notion that mental imagery involves purely analog representations

Stephen Reed

He proposed that people sometimes store pictures as descriptions and supports the idea that a verbal propositional code may be used to describe and recall visual stimuli

Visualizers

These are the people who report constructing strong mental images and rely heavily on visual imagery for tasks involving memory and problem-solving.

Verbalizers

These are the people who rely more on verbal descriptions

Self-Report Measures

________ of cognitive styles do not reliably indicate the types of processes engaged during thinking

Visualizers

Nishimura and colleagues used MEG to investigate cognitive styles where they found that _______ produced more activity in the occipital regions, implicated in the visual processing

Verbalizers

Nishimura and colleagues used MEG to investigate cognitive styles where they found that _______ showed more activation in the frontal cortical areas associated with linguistic processing

Demand Characteristics

It refers to all the cues that might convey the experimenter’s hypothesis to the participant

Masking Effect

It is virtually unknown to people who have not completed a psychology course in perception, indicating that demand characteristics are unlikely to explain the results

Auditory Imagery

It is our mental representation of sound when these sounds are not physically present

Pitch

It is a prominent feature of auditory imagery and is a characteristic of a sound stimulus that can be arranged on a scale from low to high

Timbre

It refers to the sound quality of a tone

Timbre

Imagine someone playing “Happy Birthday” on a flute. Now, contrast that sound quality with the same song played on a trumpet. Even when the two versions of the song have the same pitch, the flute tune seems relatively pure. This is an example of?

Cognitive Map

It is a mental representation of geographic information, including the environment that surrounds us

Cognitive Map

Our ______ represent areas that are too large to be seen in a single glance, creating it through the integration of information that we have acquired from many successive views

Spatial Cognition

The research in cognitive maps is part of a larger topic called ________

Spatial Cognition

It refers to three cognitive activities, namely, our thoughts about cognitive maps, how we remember the world we navigate, how we keep track of objects in a spatial array

Heuristic

It is a general problem-solving strategy that usually produces a correct solution but not always

90-degree-angle Heuristic

When people use the ______, they represent angles in a mental map as being closer to 90 degrees than they really are

Rotation Heuristic

According to the _____, a figure that is slightly tilted will be remembered as being either more vertical or more horizontal than it really is

Alignment Heuristic

It is the tendency to mentally align objects in a spatial layout to make them more consistent with each other than they actually are.

Spatial Framework Model

It emphasizes that the above below spatial dimension is especially important in our thinking, the front-back dimension is moderately important, and the right-left dimension is least important

Situated Cognition Approach

According to the ______, we make use of helpful information in the immediate environment or situation, which is important when we create mental maps, form concepts, and solver poblems