PSYC 230 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Parietal Lobe, Visual Cortex, Frontal Lobe
Document Summary
Visual imagery: seeing in the absence of a visual stimulus. Mental imagery: experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of sensory input images, tastes, sounds. Aristotle: thought is impossible without an image . How can we test this claim: use someone who was blind from birth. Early research into imagery slowed dramatically during behaviorism. Developed ways to measure behavior that could be used to infer cognitive processes: paired-associate learning. You can visualize a truck & tree. But you cant visualize truth & justice. Paivio (1963 & 1965: memory for words that evoke mental images is better than those that do not, conceptual-peg hypothesis. Concrete nouns create images that other words can. Shepard & meltzer (1971: mental chronometry, participants mentally rotated one object to see if it matched another object [funky block picture] Imagery and perception rely on similar mechanisms. Spatial aspect to rotating in real life that carries over into imagery. Imagery & perception: kosslyn (1973): mental scanning.
