Mental Imagery
What is mental imagery?
A mental representation of stimuli that aren't actually present (ex: seeing or hearing something in your mind)
Shepard and Metzler’s (1971) classic mental rotation study asked people to decide whether two 3D objects were the same or different. What was their main finding about reaction time?
It increased as the angle of rotation between the objects increased
What is auditory imagery?
Forming a mental representation of a sound when no sound is physically present (ex: imagining someone's voice)
What is a cognitive map?
A mental representation of geographic information which shows the relationships among locations
What is a heuristic in the context of cognitive maps?
A general mental shortcut or strategy that usually leads to a reasonable judgment but can sometimes cause systematic errors
In mental imagery, information comes primarily from which memory system? (ex: long, short...)
Long-term memory
The mental rotation results from Shepard and Metzler (1971) support which view of imagery storage: analog or propositional-code?
The analog-code view
What is pitch in auditory imagery?
A characteristic of sound that can be arranged on a scale from low to high
Thorndyke's (1981) study showed that estimated distance between two cities is influenced by what factor on a route?
The number of intervening cities between them (more cities → perceived as farther apart)
What is border bias?
The tendency to estimate distances as larger when locations are on opposite sides of a political/geographic border
The two main types of mental imagery discussed in chapter 7 are...?
Visual and auditory imagery
In the analog-code approach, a mental image is stored in a format that closely resembles...?
The actual perceptual image or what would appear on the retina
What is timbre?
The quality or "color" of a sound that allows us to distinguish between instruments playing the same note (ex: flute vs trumpet)
What is survey knowledge of an environment?
Knowledge of relationships among locations learned from a map or repeated exploration of an area
In the 90-degree-angle heuristic, how do people distort angles at street intersections?
They "regularize" them, remembering them as closer to 90° than they actually are
Name one real-world use of mental imagery as a discipline or application mentioned in the powerpoint/pdf (hint: there's 4 examples!)
Solving spatial problems (like arranging furniture), creativity (design), clinical psychology (phobias), or STEM fields such as science, technology, engineering and math.
What is the propositional-code approach to mental imagery?
The idea that images are stored in abstract, language-like descriptions rather than picture-like representations
In their research, Intons-Peterson and colleagues (1992) found that the time it takes to "travel" between two imagined tones is related to...?
The actual pitch distance between the real tones (greater pitch difference = longer imagined travel time)
The landmark effect says we tend to estimate distances as shorter when traveling to what type of destination?
A landmark or prominent location, compared to a non-landmark
The rotation heuristic leads us to misremember what about a tilted geographic region? (ex: California or the US-Canada border)
We mentally rotate it to be more vertical or horizontal than it actually is
Why is mental imagery considered “top-down” processing?
You build images from information already stored in your long-term memory
Reed’s (1974) study with the six-pointed star and hidden parallelogram suggested what about complex images?
For complex images, people often store them using propositional codes rather than detailed analog "pictures"
In their research, Halpern and colleagues (2004) showed what important similarity between real sounds and imagined sounds of musical instruments?
Ratings of timbre for imagined instruments were highly correlated with ratings for actual instruments which suggests similar cognitive representations
According to Franklin & Tversky’s (1990) work with the spatial framework model, which spatial dimension is processed fastest: above–below, front–back, or left–right?
Above–below is fastest, then front–back, and then left–right is slowest
The alignment heuristic explains why many people think Philadelphia is north of Rome. What does this heuristic say we do with separate regions like North America and Europe? (hint: think back to the 2 previous questions before this)
We mentally line them up more than they actually are, aligning them on the same latitude which distorts relative positions