Mental Imagery
What is Mental Imagery?
The mental representation of stimuli when those stimuli are not physically present in the environment.
What type of analysis is used as a statistical method for combining numerous studies on a single topic?
Meta-analysis
What is a cognitive map?
A mental representation of geographic information, including the environment that surrounds us.
What is the situated cognition approach?
We make use of helpful information in the immediate environment or situation. In other words, our knowledge depends on the context that surrounds us.
What is an analog code and give an example of one.
A representation that closely resembles the physical object. In other words, it is not abstract and contains perceptual features of the object.
(i.e. imagining a vase by actually "seeing" the vase in your head)
What are demand characteristics?
Cues that might convey the experimenter's hypothesis to the participant.
What is the term for a general problem-solving strategy that usually produces a correct solution (but not always)?
A heuristic "hyoo-riss-tick"
What is the name of an important characteristic of a sound, and what does it describe?
Timbre "tam-ber"
The sound quality of tone.
What do people with prosopagnosia have problems with?
These individuals have problems in creating visual imagery for faces.
What is a magnetoencephalography (MEG)?
A cognitive neuroscientific testing method in which stimulus-evoked neuronal activity is recorded via sensors placed on the scalp.
What are the three cognitive activities that spatial cognition primarily refers to?
(1) our thoughts about cognitive maps
(2) how we remember the world we navigate
(3) how we keep track of objects in spatial array
What is the one prominent feature of auditory imagery and define it.
Pitch
It is a characteristic of sound stimulus that can be arranged on a scale from low to high
What did John Watson's argue against Wilhelm Wundt's take on mental imagery, and why was he opposed to Wundt's take?
Watson argued that imagery did not exist, and he opposed research on mental imagery because it could not be connected to obervable behavior.
Stephen Reed proposed that people sometimes store pictures as descriptions using what kind of code? And define that code.
Propositional Code
An abstract, language-like representation storage that is neither visual nor spatial, and it does not physically resemble the original stimulus.
Barbara Tversky points out that we use heuristics when we represent relative positions in our mental maps, however these heuristics encourage two kinds of errors. What are these two errors?
1. We remember a slightly tilted geographic structure as being either more vertical or more horizontal than it really is (the rotation heuristic).
and
2. We remember a series of geographic structures as being arranged in a straighter line than they really are (the alignment heuristic).
Rank the spatial framework model on spatial dimension from least important to most important. (hint* there are three levels)
Least important: the right-left dimension
Moderately important: the front-back dimension
Most important: the above-below dimension