Exam 1 - L7

Question 1

Depictive vs propositional codes

Answer 1

Depictive: picture-like
Propositional: language-like
Involves putting together strings of concepts and
relationships between them

Question 2

Evidence for depictive codes

Answer 2

Interference effects
-Perform 2 tasks simultaneously
-If they interfere with each other, then they must
require the same system
Image scanning
-Memorize a picture and try to imagine it
-Press a button when you arrive at an intended
destination
-RT is longer if the distance from point A to point B
is longer
Zooming
-Told to imagine 2 animals (rabbit and elephant)
and to zoom out until the larger animal fills this
imagined space
-Task: answer some questions about the animal
-Result: RT is faster when asked about the larger
animal
-Suggests we imagine this as a visual image, where
the larger animal takes up most of the space and
we have to zoom in to see details of the smaller
animal
Mental rotation
-Given 2 3D objects at different orientations
-Task: tell if these objects are the same
-Result: RT is slower if the given object is at a higher
degree of orientation
-Suggests we are visually imagining this object and
rotating it since it will take longer if you have to
rotate it more

Question 3

Demand characteristics

Answer 3

Participants behave a certain way because they think the experimenter implicitly wants them to

Question 4

Imagery

Answer 4

mental representation of something not currently sensed
-Typically top-down and requires effort to maintain
-Can vanish quickly

Question 5

Perception

Answer 5

-Has metric qualities that imagery does not
-Certain automatic properties that allow us to easily identify things
-Stable

Question 6

Imagery vs perception

Answer 6

Metric qualities: better able to judge differences in distance and notice asymmetries with perception
Alludes to certain heuristics we use with cognitive maps
Part-whole relationships: easier to pick out parts of an object using perception
Ambiguous figures: easier to flip between interpretations of ambiguous figures using perception

Question 7

Compromise theory

Answer 7

We probably use both proportional and depictive codes, but how?
Compromise theory:
-Memory representations are stored as
propositional codes in long term memory
-We can then use those propositional codes to
generate a depictive representation
-Once we have the depictive representation, we
can zoom, rotate, scan, etc.