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Mental Imagery. The evidence in favor of us seeing actual pictures in our mind. Mental Rotation. Shepard & Metzler (1967) did the classic mental rotation experiment. Show people two arbitrary, 3-D objects at different orientations.
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Mental Imagery The evidence in favor of us seeing actual pictures in our mind.
Mental Rotation • Shepard & Metzler (1967) did the classic mental rotation experiment. • Show people two arbitrary, 3-D objects at different orientations. • Ask people to judge whether the objects are mirror images of each other or not. • The amount of time it takes people to answer is directly proportional to the degrees of rotation by which the objects differ.
Relative size & Image scaling • When asked to imagine two objects, it takes longer to make judgments about the smaller object • It also takes longer to make judgments about smaller features of objects
Image scanning • Give people a picture of something, such as a map of a simplistic island and have them memorize it. • Ask people to scan the image from one point on the map to another. • The time it takes to do this is proportional to how far apart the two points are.
The Mind’s Eye hypothesis • Kosslyn proposed that mental imagery is functionally equivalent to vision. • What he means by this is that mental imagery uses the same internal representations and processes that vision does, but without visual input.
Could it be true? • fMRI experiments indicate that the occipital lobe and other early visual areas are active during imagery tasks. • Single-cell recording in monkeys shows that areas activated during training for a task also become activated when the monkey simply “imagines” performing the task.
