Mental Imagery
This is the mental representation of stimuli that are not physically present.
What is mental imagery?
Shepard and Metzler discovered that reaction time increases as this increases during rotation tasks.
What is the angle of rotation?
This approach says mental images resemble the physical object they represent.
What is the analog code approach?
This type of imagery involves imagining sounds like laughter or a car horn.
What is auditory imagery?
This is the mental representation of geographical information and relationships between locations.
What is a cognitive map?
This type of processing creates mental images using knowledge from long-term memory.
What is top-down processing?
When two mental objects are farther apart, people take longer to scan between them.
What is the distance effect in mental imagery?
This approach claims mental images are stored as abstract language-like descriptions.
What is the propositional code approach?
This refers to how high or low a sound is perceived.
What is pitch?
This broader field studies how people think about locations and spatial relationships.
What is spatial cognition?
Judging shapes like clock angles in mental imagery demonstrates this effect.
What is the shape effect?
Research shows this cognitive skill has the largest gender differences in rotation tasks.
What is spatial ability?
This explains why large rotations take longer than small ones.
What is the analog approach?
The quality that distinguishes sounds like a flute versus a trumpet.
What is timbre?
The tendency to estimate distances as larger when locations are in different countries or states.
What is border bias?
When imagining a visual object interferes with detecting a visual stimulus.
What is imagery interference in the same sensory modality?
This brain region becomes active when people create detailed visual mental images.
What is the visual cortex?
This explains spatial processing, where above-below judgments are fastest.
What is the spatial framework model?
Research shows people mentally “travel” longer between sounds that differ greatly in this feature.
What is pitch distance?
The tendency to think geographic structures are more lined up than they really are.
What is the alignment heuristic?