11. Mental Imagery

What is a mental image?

• Imagery is the mental representation of things that are not currently seen or sensed by the sense organs.

  In our minds, we often have images of objects, events, and settings.

• Mental imagery even can represent things that you have never experienced. For example, imagine what it would be like to travel down the Amazon River.

• Mental images even may represent things that do not exist at all outside the mind of the person creating the image.

• Imagery may involve mental representations in any of the sensory modalities, such as hearing, smell, or taste.

• Hence, Mental imagery, also called visualization and mental rehearsal is defined as:

  Experience that resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate stimuli for the relevant perception. It is a “ mental representation” of a non-present object or event.

•Dual-coding hypothesis suggests that there are two codes and two storage systems;

• one imaginal

• one verbal

• one auditory

•Mental images are _______________________.

• Analog Codes

• Symbolic Codes

•Verbal representation of words is ___________________.

• Analog Codes

• Symbolic Codes

_______________________ retain the main perceptual features of whatever is being represented, so the images we form in our minds are highly similar to the physical stimuli.

• Analog Codes

• Symbolic Codes

____________________________ on the other hand, are a form of knowledge representation chosen to represent something arbitrarily, as opposed to perceptually. Similar to the way a watch may represent information in the form of numbers to display the time, symbolic codes represent information in our mind in the form of arbitrary symbols, like words and combinations of words, to represent several ideas.

• Analog Codes

• Symbolic Codes

_______________________ also called visualization and mental rehearsal is defined as:

Experience that resembles perceptual experience, but which occurs in the absence of the appropriate stimuli for the relevant perception. It is a “ mental representation” of a non-present object or event.

• Mental Imagery

• Cognitive Maps

_______________________ are internal representations of our physical environment, particularly centering on spatial relationships. Cognitive maps seem to offer internal representations that simulate particular spatial features of our external environment

• Mental Imagery

• Cognitive Maps

________________________ is information about particular features at a location and which may be based on both imaginal and propositional representations.

• Landmark knowledge

• Route-road knowledge

• Survey knowledge

________________________ involves specific pathways for moving from one location to another. It may be based on both procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge.

• Landmark knowledge

• Route-road knowledge

• Survey knowledge