Definitions
What is mental imagery?
Mental representation of stimuli that aren't actually present.
What were the results from the Shepard and Meltzer study?
Decision time was strongly influenced by amount of mental rotation required to make a decision.
How are visual images stored?
They are stored through the propositional-code approach.
What is a timbre?
It is the sound quality of a tone.
What were the implications for the Reed (1974) study?
For complex mental images, we use verbal, proposition codes.
What happens during analog coding?
It takes longer to perform a large rotation than a small one, thus activating visual properties of the objects.
What is auditory imagery?
A mental representation of a sound when the sounds are not physically present.
What were the implications from the Chambers & Reisberg (1985) study?
It's easy to reverse an image while you are looking at an ambiguous physical picture, but reversing a mental image is difficult.
What is the imagery debate?
This debate centers around the issue of how that information is stored.
What is propositional-code approach?
Mental images stored in an abstract, language-like form that doesn't physically resemble the original stimulus.
What were the results of the Segal & Fusella (1970) study?
Mental image interfered when in the same sensory modality.
What is propositional representation?
the idea that mental connections between objects are represented by symbols, instead of mental images.
What is analog code?
Create a mental image of an object that closely resembles the actual, perceptual image on your retina.
According to the Shepard & Metlzer (1971) study, what does large rotation result in?
It results in more time.
What were the results of the imagery debate?
Behavioral and cognitive neuroscientific data supports an analog code. However, the effect of ambiguous visual images is difficult for the analog account to accomodate.