PSY 260 Lecture 19: Visual Imagery and Visual-Spatial Knowledge

• School: Stony Brook University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 260
• Professor: Nancy Franklin

Document Summary

Info was in the image, so can be extracted and made conscious. Most people (cid:396)epo(cid:396)t (cid:862)looki(cid:374)g(cid:863) at (cid:373)e(cid:374)tal pi(cid:272)tu(cid:396)e to a(cid:374)s(cid:449)e(cid:396) these. Mental images play a functional role in memory, problem solving, and reasoning. Human cognition makes use of mental images and propositional representations. Mental images are epiphenomenal; they accompany real mechanisms but play no functional role. Classic evidence for analog: mental rotation additional mechanism. Takes time to rotate shapes into correspondence. Respo(cid:374)se ti(cid:373)e fo(cid:396) (cid:862)ide(cid:374)ti(cid:272)al(cid:863) figu(cid:396)es is a li(cid:374)ea(cid:396) fu(cid:374)(cid:272)tio(cid:374) of the a(cid:374)gle of (cid:396)otatio(cid:374) between the figures. Result is easy to explain if subjects are rotating a mental image. Result is hard to explain if mental representation is exclusively. Subjects study the map of an island. Using only the mental image of the island, imagine a dot moving from one point to another, e. g. from the mountain to the tree. Zooming in and out on a mental image. Top: imagine a rabbit next to an elephant.