Higher Order Cognition: Mental Imagery and Episodic Foresight
Higher-Order Cognition, Mental Imagery, and the Mental Stage
The lecture introduces higher-order aspects of cognition, transitioning from basic cognition previously discussed by Paul. The focal points are mental imagery and its specific application in episodic foresight.
Social interaction provides a starting point for understanding imagery: the anxiety felt when speaking to a group of people (such as 50 or 100 minds) stems from the realization that each mind is generating a representation—a "mini-me"—of the speaker.
This capacity to project images of the external world in the "mind's eye" touches on deep questions about the nature of consciousness, often referred to as the "ghost in the machine."
Defining the Mind and Representation
The Oxford Dictionary defines the mind as "the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences to think and to feel."
Historically, the mind was localized to the brain rather than the body parts where sensations occur. Rene Descartes famously illustrated this through the phenomenon of phantom limbs: individuals who have lost limbs still report feeling pain or sensations in that missing extremity.
This indicates that the brain represents the body and the world independently of constant physical input; sensations like burning a foot occur in the brain (via afferent and efferent signals) rather than the foot itself.
A representation is something that stands for something other than itself. While the natural world (e.g., a tree or flower) simply is what it is, the human symbolic world is filled with things like words, maps, symbols, and photographs that represent other entities.
Philosophers distinguish between the referent (the actual object in the real world) and the sense (the way in which it is represented).
Example: A house might be the referent. A verbal description, a photograph, and a glossed-up real estate rendering are different senses representing that same referent.
Analog vs. Propositional Representations
Analog Representations: These maintain a one-to-one relationship with their referent, known as an isomorphism.
Example: A photograph maintains spatial correspondence with the faces it captures.
Example: An analog clock hand moves in a one-to-one temporal and spatial relationship to the passing of time.
Propositional Representations: These are also known as allegorical representations. They do not have a one-to-one relationship but rely on arbitrary symbols and rules.
Example: A digital clock uses symbols ( to ) that are arbitrary. The difference between the symbols for and does not inherently represent the size of a second in the way a physical movement does; it is a convention agreed upon by users.
Cogntive science debates whether the mental representations we experience when closing our eyes are analog or propositional.
The Function and Power of Imagination
Imagination allows humans to generate new information from existing knowledge.
Door Handle Exercise: Most people can recall if their bedroom door handle was on the left or right at age 12 by "revisiting" it in their mind's eye, despite not deliberately storing that fact.
Door Counting Exercise: Students can count the total number of doors in their current home by mentally zipping through a visualization, a number they did not previously "know" but could derive from imagery.
Adaptive Importance:
Freedom from the Here and Now: We can solve problems (like counting how many door handles to buy at a hardware store) without being physically present in the location.
Freedom from Reality: We can imagine counterfactuals (events that did not happen) or multiple versions of the future to avoid negative outcomes.
Skill Improvement: Imagination can hone physical and cognitive skills. Study examples include soccer players practicing bicycle kicks mentally to avoid injury, or piano students practicing a music score in their minds. Both groups show actual performance improvements compared to controls.
Mental Maps and the Hippocampus
Mammals use mental maps for navigation. In , John O'Keefe received the Nobel Prize for identifying place cells in the hippocampus that neurologically encode these maps.
The Knowledge: London cab drivers undergo years of training to map the city. Studies showed that these drivers physically grew a larger hippocampus as a result of this intense spatial practice, though this may decline with the use of GPS.
Navigation involves more than trial and error; it involves inventing new routes. Rats in mazes and elephants in the Namib Desert (traveling up to in a day to invisible water holes) demonstrate the use of mental maps.
Empirical Theories of Imagery
Pavio’s Dual Coding Hypothesis: Proposes we store information in both a verbal code and an imaginal code.
Evidence: Concrete words (e.g., table) are remembered significantly better than abstract words (e.g., justice) because concrete words can be coded both visually and verbally.
Propositional Storage (Anderson and Bauer): They argue analog storage is impossible due to memory space limits ( storage concepts). They claim we store interpretations or the "gist."
Evidence: Subjects presented with "The boy kissed the girl" often falsely recognize "The girl was kissed by the boy." This suggests the meaning (predicate calculus) is stored, not the verbatim structure.
Interpretational Effects: Subjects shown a drawing and told it was "barbells" later misidentified the original drawing in favor of one with a longer connecting line. Those told "spectacles" favored a drawing with a shorter line. This shows that labels change the stored mental image.
The Functional Equivalence Hypothesis
Proposed by Shepard and Kosslyn, this hypothesis suggests imagination retains the functional characteristics of relationships in the real world and uses the same neurocognitive resources as perception.
Support for Analog Effects:
Mental Transformation: Rotating a capital letter "D" right and placing a "4" on top creates a "boat," a discovery made through visual manipulation.
Image Size/Scaling: Reaction times (RT) to questions about a frog are faster if the frog is imagined next to a fly (making the frog large) rather than an elephant (making the frog small).
Image Scanning: In a study by Kosslyn, the physical distance between two points on a memorized fictional island map correlated linearly with the time it took subjects to "travel" between them in their mind's eye.
Mental Rotation: Roger Shepard discovered an "outrageously linear" relationship between the angle of rotation of an object and the time taken to identify if it matched a comparison object. This effect holds even in baboons, who are actually faster than humans at this task.
Modality-Specific Interference:
Visual imagination (e.g., imagining a beach) interferes with visual detection tasks (noticing a dot on a screen) but not auditory tasks.
Auditory imagination (imagining a telephone ringing) interferes with auditory detection (hearing a beep) but not visual tasks.
Aftereffects: Looking at an anticlockwise spinning disk for creates a clockwise aftereffect. This aftereffect slows down mental rotation tasks that require anticlockwise movement and speeds up clockwise mental rotation.
Clinical and Neurological Findings
Visual Neglect: Bisiach and Luzatti studied patients with right parietal lobe damage who ignored half their visual field. When asked to imagine the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, patients only described buildings on the side relative to their mental perspective. When they "turned around" in their mind, they described the previously ignored buildings, showing neglect applies to imagination as well as perception.
Shrinking the Mental Stage: Martha Farah studied a patient who underwent an occipital lobectomy. Prior to surgery, the patient could "see" a whole horse in her mind at ; after surgery, she had to move the horse behaviorally to or more to fit it in her reduced mental stage.
Neuroimaging: PET and ERP (Event-Related Potential) studies show that imagining a scene causes higher activation in the visual cortex than actually perceiving it. People with hyperphantasia (vivid imagery) show greater activity, while those with aphantasia (no imagery) show very little.
Episodic Foresight: The Psychology of the Future
While animals show future-directed behaviors—like squirrels hoarding nuts or E. coli switching genes to digest maltose—these are typically instinctual or simple associative learning (Pavlovian or Operant conditioning).
Humans possess Mental Time Travel, allowing them to link actions across days, months, or years (e.g., getting a degree for a future job).
Key Human Traits:
Thinking about the long-term future.
Considering multiple mutually exclusive possibilities (e.g., preparing for rain during a picnic).
Comparative and Developmental Evidence
The Tube Task: A tube with two exits. Dropping a reward that comes out either the left or right.
Human Children: By age , children cover both exits with their hands to ensure they catch the reward. Two-year-olds fail, usually covering only one.
Great Apes: Chimpanzees and orangutans (e.g., an orangutan named Holly) fail even after trials, usually covering only one exit rather than both.
Bilateral Link: Episodic memory (past) and episodic foresight (future) are two sides of the same coin.
They share brain areas (medial temporal and medial prefrontal lobes).
Amnesic patients (like H.M. or Clive Wearing) who cannot remember the past also cannot imagine the future.
Depression, schizophrenia, and aging show parallel declines in both memory and foresight.
The Theatrical Metaphor and Social Coordination
The lecturer proposes a "theatrical metaphor" for the mind:
The Stage: Working memory and imagination.
The Actors: Representations of self and others (Theory of Mind/Folk Psychology).
The Physics: Understanding of real-world relationships (Functional Equivalence).
The Playwright: Generativity and narrative skill to create scenarios.
The Director: Evaluation of scenarios (Is it legal? sensible? funny?).
The Executive Producer: Executive functions that decide which plan to act upon.
Social Wiring: Humans broadcast these mental scenarios via language. Asking someone who has "already been there" (e.g., visiting New Zealand or becoming a psychologist) allows us to refine our predictions.
Implications and the Cost of Foresight
Benefits: Enormous behavioral flexibility, coordination of complex plans (e.g., meeting for a lecture next Friday), and the creation of defensive structures or technologies.
Example: Otzi the Iceman ( years old) carried a fire kit, sewing kit, and medicinal mushrooms—all evidence of extensive preparation for future contingencies.
Costs: Anxiety about the future, awareness of mortality, and the rise of greed (taking more than needed because of planned future use).
The Planetary Crossroad: Humans can predict the destruction of environments (e.g., Gunung Leuser National Park) or changes in climate.
Investment in the Future: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a multi-million-dollar investment for the benefit of future generations in the event of global disaster, representing the ultimate reach of human foresight.
Questions & Discussion
Students were asked to participate in visual exercises regarding their old bedrooms and current house layouts.
A question arose during Pavio's section regarding whether the experimentation involved specific lists; the lecturer confirmed that concrete words are consistently remembered better across trials.
There was a prompt regarding the direction of the mental rotation aftereffect in relation to a specific exam-style question involving a spinning disk and the letter "R."