Chapter 10: Visual Imagery

Question 1

Seeing in the absence of visual stimulation

Answer 1

Visual imagery

Question 2

Refers to the ability to re-create the sensory world in the absence of physical stimuli

Answer 2

Mental imagery

Question 3

Debate over whether thinking could occur with or without images

Answer 3

Imageless thought debate

Question 4

What was Galton’s evidence that imagery is not required for thinking?

Answer 4

Observed people who had difficulty forming visual images

Question 5

What is the behaviorist perspective on imagery?

Answer 5

Unproductive as visual images are invisible to everyone but the people experiencing them.

Question 6

How did imagery become relevant to psychology again?

Answer 6

The cognitive revolution (measuring behaviour to infer cognitive processes)

Question 7

Describe Alan Paivio’s work on memory

Answer 7

Found that it’s easier to remember concrete nouns as opposed to abstract nouns

Question 8

Describe the paired-associate learning technique

Answer 8

Participants are presented with pairs of words during the study period, then presented during a test period. With the first word from each pair, their tasks is to recall the word that was paired with it during the study period.

Question 9

Concrete nouns create images that other words can hang onto

Answer 9

The conceptual peg hypothesis

Question 10

Determining the amount of time it takes to carry out various cognitive tasks.

Answer 10

Mental chronometry

Question 11

Describe the mental rotation experiment

Answer 11

How long it takes to determine if the two images were the same or different, where the time it took to decide was related to how different the angles were as participants were using mental rotation

Question 12

A process in which participants create mental images and then scan them in their mind

Answer 12

Mental scanning

Question 13

Describe Kosslyn’s mental scanning experiment

Answer 13

Asked participants to memorize a picture of a boat and focus on one aspect of it, then look for another part of the boat and indicate whether they found it or not

Question 14

What was concluded from Kosslyn’s mental scanning experiment?

Answer 14

Imagery and perception are spatial, and it should take longer to find parts that are further from the initial point

Question 15

Representations in which different parts of an image can be described as corresponding to specific locations in space

Answer 15

Spatial representation

Question 16

Representations which relationships can be represented by abstract symbols such as an equation or statement like “the cat is under the table”

Answer 16

Proportional representations

Question 17

Something that accompanies the real mechanism but is not part of the mechanism

Answer 17

Epiphenomenon

Question 18

Parts of the representation correspond to parts of the object.

Answer 18

Depictive representation

Question 19

Which form of representation did the imagery debate settle on?

Answer 19

Spatial representation

Question 20

Describe the evidence Kosslyn found with respect to images being spatial

Answer 20

Answered questions about imagined animals more quickly when they filled more of the visual field

Had to move closer for smaller animals than larger animals

Question 21

Describe two experiments demonstrating how imagery affects perception and vice versa

Answer 21

Perky: Projected dim images onto a screen and asked participants to visualize and describe what the image represented, participants ended up describing the projected image without realizing

Farah: Target letter is detected more accurately when participants were imagining the same letter

Question 22

Describe how evidence from neurons supports the relationship between imagery and perception

Answer 22

Neurons in different brain areas responding similarly to real and imagined stimuli demonstrates a physiological mechanism to imagery

Question 23

How did brain imaging show the relationship between image size and the visual cortex?

Answer 23

Smaller images generated activity in the back of the visual cortex and large images in the front (same as perception)

Question 24

Describe the results of Ganis’ fMRI study

Answer 24

Perception and imagery both activate the same area in the frontal lobe and farther back in the brain, however perception activates more areas such as the visual cortex in the occipital lobe

Question 25

Trains a classifier to associate a pattern of voxel activation with particular stimuli, then present a stimulus to see if the classifier can identify It based on the pattern of voxel activity created by the stimulus

Answer 25

Multivoxel pattern analysis (MVAP)

Question 26

What were Kosslyn’s findings regarding TMS and perception/imagery?

Answer 26

TMS to the visual cortex causes slower responses in both perception and imagery, concluding that activity in the visual cortex plays a role in both

Question 27

Describe the case of MGS.

Answer 27

About to have part pf her occipital lobe removed to treat epilepsy

Pre-surgery mental walk task revealed image overflow at 15ft

Post-surgery mental walk task revealed overflow at 35ft

Reduced size of field of view

Question 28

Give examples as to how problems with perception are accompanied with problems with imagery and describe what they are evidence of.

Answer 28

People who have lost the ability to see colour due to brain damage are also unable to create colours through imagery.

Unilateral neglect

Evidence that mental imagery and perception share the same physiological mechanisms.

Question 29

Damage to the parietal lobes that causes patients to ignore objects in one half of their visual field e.g. they shave one side of their face and neglect the other.

Answer 29

Unilateral neglect

Question 30

Describe three instances of dissociation between imagery and perception

Answer 30

Cecilia and Guarilia studied a patient whose brain damage didn’t really effect his ability to perceive but caused him to neglect his mental images (limited to one side)

R.M suffered damage in his occipital lobe and parietal lobes, he was able to recognize objects and draw accurate pictures of objects that were placed in front of him but was unable to draw them from memory which requires imagery. He also had trouble answering questions related to imagery.

Marlene Behrman studied C.K a 33y/o grad student who got hit by a car as he was jogging, he suffered from visual agnosia (inability to visually recognize object) he could recognize parts of the object but couldn’t integrate them into a meaningful whole.

Question 31

A method in which things that need to remember are placed at different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout

Answer 31

Method of loci

Question 32

Involves imagery but instead of visualizing items in different locations you associate them with concrete words

Answer 32

Pegword technique