Cognitive Psychology And Its Implications, Ch. 4
Cognitive Psychology And Its Implications, Ch. 4
Respond in 1000 words with some scholarly references. Use citations, cite your references.
Please read attachment.
What did you find most interesting or “surprising” about chapter 4?
chapter_4.docx
4
Mental Imagery
Try answering these two questions:
• How many windows are in your house? • How many nouns are in the American Pledge of Allegiance?
Most people who answer these questions have the same experience. For the first
question they imagine themselves walking around their house and counting windows.
For the second question, if they do not actually say the Pledge of Alliance out loud,
they imagine themselves saying the Pledge of Allegiance. In both cases they are creating
mental images of what they would have perceived had they actually walked around
the house or said the Pledge of Allegiance.
Use of visual imagery is particularly important. As a result of our primate heritage,
a large portion of our brain functions to process visual information. Therefore, we use
these brain structures as much as we can, even in the absence of a visual signal from
the outside world, by creating mental images in our heads. Some of humankind’s most
creative acts involve visual imagery. For instance, Einstein claimed he discovered the
theory of relativity by imagining himself traveling beside a beam of light.
A major debate in this field of research has been the degree to which the processes
behind visual imagery are the same as the perceptual and attentional processes that we
considered in the previous two chapters. Some researchers (e.g., Pylyshyn, 1973, in an
article sarcastically titled “What the mind’s eye tells the mind’s brain”) have argued that
the perceptual experience that we have while doing an activity such as picturing the
windows in our house is an epiphenomenon; that is, it is a mental experience that does
not have any functional role in information processing. The philosopher Daniel Dennett
(1969) also argued that mental images are epiphenomenal—that is, that the perceptual
components of mental images are not really functional in any way:
Consider the Tiger and his Stripes. I can dream, imagine or see a striped tiger, but
must the tiger I experience have a particular number of stripes? If seeing or imagining
is having a mental image, then the image of the tiger must—obeying the rules of
images in general—reveal a definite number of stripes showing, and one should be
able to pin this down with such questions as “more than ten?”, “less than twenty?”
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Verbal Imagery versus Visual Imagery | 93
Dennett’s argument is that if we are actually seeing a tiger in a mental image, we
should be able to count its stripes just like we could if we actually saw a tiger.
Because we cannot count the stripes in a mental image of a tiger, we are not having
a real perceptual experience. This argument is not considered decisive, but it does
illustrate the discomfort some people have with the claim that mental images are
actually perceptual in character.
This chapter will review some of the experimental evidence showing the ways that
mental imagery does play a role in information processing. We will define mental
imagery broadly as the processing of perceptual-like information in the absence of an
external source for the perceptual information. We will consider the following questions: • How do we process the information in a mental image? • How is imaginal processing related to perceptual processing? • What brain areas are involved in mental imagery? • How do we develop mental images of our environment and use these
to navigate through the environment?
•Verbal Imagery versus Visual Imagery
There is increasing evidence from cognitive neuroscience that several different
brain regions are involved in imagery. This evidence has come both from studies
of patients suffering damage to various brain regions and from studies of the
brain activation of normal individuals as they engage in various imagery tasks.
In one of the early studies of brain activation patterns during imagery, Roland
and Friberg (1985) identified many of the brain regions that have been investigated
in subsequent research. They had participants either mentally rehearse a
word jingle or mentally rehearse finding their way around streets in their neighborhoods.
The investigators measured changes in blood flow in various parts of
the cortex. Figure 4.1 illustrates the principal areas they identified.When participants
engaged in the verbal jingle task, there was activation in the prefrontal cortex
near Broca’s area and in the parietal-temporal region of the posterior cortex
R
R
R
R
J
J
FIGURE 4.1 Results from
Roland and Friberg’s (1985)
study of brain activation
patterns during mental imagery.
Regions of the left cortex
showed increased blood flow
when participants imagined
a verbal jingle (J) or a spatial
route (R).
Brain Structures
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near Wernicke’s area. As discussed in Chapter 1, patients with damage to these
regions show deficits in language processing. When participants engaged in the
visual task, there was activation in the parietal cortex, occipital cortex, and temporal
cortex. All these areas are involved in visual perception and attention, as
we saw in Chapters 2 and 3.When people process imagery of language or visual
information, some of the same areas are active as when they process actual
speech or visual information.
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An experiment by Santa (1977) demonstrated the functional consequence
of representing information in a visual image versus representing it in a verbal
image. The two conditions of Santa’s experiment are shown in Figure 4.2. In
the geometric condition (Figure 4.2a), participants studied an array of three
geometric objects, arranged with one object centered below the other two.
This array had a facelike property—without much effort, we can see eyes and a
mouth. After participants studied the array, it was removed, and they had to
hold the information in their minds. They were presented with one of several
different test arrays. The participants’ task was to verify that the test array contained
the same elements as the study array, although not necessarily in the same