Mental Imagery
Image resembles a physical object
What is How to study it?
Cognitive process that involves imagining an object turning in space to see if it matches another shape
What is mental rotation?
This classic debate in cognitive psychology asks whether mental images are more like visual pictures or like language-like descriptions.
What is the imagery debate?
Research shows that, on average, males tend to outperform females on this specific type of imagery task involving rotating objects
What is mental rotation?
This term describes mental shortcuts or “rules of thumb” that simplify decision making.
What is a heuristic?
Creativity, STEM disciples, solving spatial problems
What is What do we use it for?
According to Shepard and Metzler (1971), response time increases with this factor during mental rotation tasks.
What is angle of rotation?
This psychologist supported the analog/pictorial view of imagery and conducted the famous mental rotation experiments
Who is Roger Shepard?
Females tend to perform better than males on these types of tasks, which rely on memory for word lists or emotional content
What are verbal memory tasks?
The availability heuristic leads people to judge the likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. This can cause this kind of error.
What is a bias or availability bias?
Who is the researcher that decided Decision time strongly influenced by
amount of mental rotation required to make
decision
Shepard & Metzler
Mental rotation is typically considered to rely more heavily on this hemisphere of the brain
What is the right hemisphere?
This term refers to the idea that mental images are picture-like and share some properties with actual perception.
What is analog representation?
This term refers to culturally shaped beliefs or stereotypes that might impact someone’s performance due to pressure or anxiety.
What is stereotype threat?
This is the tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities or knowledge when making decisions using heuristics.
What is overconfidence bias?
Kosslyn, Thompson et al., (2001)
who is the researcher that said Primary motor cortex activated during mental rotation but
only for group with “hands on” experience actually rotating
the object
Kosslyn, Thompson et al., (2001)
Mental rotation tasks often show performance differences based on this developmental factor, with older adults sometimes performing more slowly.
what is age?
This term refers to abstract, language-like representations that Pylyshyn argued were the true format of mental images.
What is propositional representation?
Some studies find that males may show greater activation in this brain region during mental rotation tasks.
What is the parietal lobe?
This effect occurs when people remember or navigate environments better by using prominent features, like buildings or statues, as reference points.
What is the landmark effect?
Analog-coding
• It takes longer to perform a large rotation than a small
one, thus activating visual properties of the objects
• A propositional code would predict similar
reaction times for these two conditions
What does the mental rotation research
support?
Mental rotation relies on this limited-capacity system that temporarily holds and manipulates visual and spatial information.
What is working memory?
According to the propositional view, mental representations are structured more like this, rather than pictures.
What are semantic networks or logical propositions?
Research shows that gender differences tend to be largest in this cognitive domain, with males often outperforming females on average.
What is spatial ability (or spatial cognition)?
In mental rotation tasks, objects rotated by this angle often take less time to mentally rotate compared to oblique angles like 45 or 135
What is 90 degrees?