PSYC 2650 Lecture Notes - Sundae, Roger Shepard, Fudge
Document Summary
Visual imagery serves an important role in our daily lives, even without our realizing it. It plays a causal role in our behaviors, such as when we salivate or feel hungry after mentally picturing a hot fudge ice cream sundae. While purchasing a new sweater, we may image how it would look with our black striped pants. Or if buying new curtains for an apartment, you might mentally rotate each room and scan the number of windows that need curtains. The way people form and process mental images has been of interest to researchers in cognitive psychology for many years. At its heart, the mental imagery debate is about the nature of the mental representations that we use, and their functional role in cognition. In the mental rotation, 2-d zap you found that there is a strong relation between the degree of mental rotation of two-dimensional letters and the time it takes to make judgments about the letters.