PSYC 2501 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10.3: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Tacit Knowledge, Hemispatial Neglect
26 Apr 2018
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10.3
• Summary
o Mental imagery is experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of
sensory input
• Visual imagery is "Seeing" in the absence of visual stimulus
• Imagery has played an important role in the creative process and as a
way of thinking in addition to purely verbal techniques
o Early ideas about imagery included the imageless thought debate and
Galton's work with visual images, but imagery research stopped during the
behaviorist era
• Imagery research began again in the 1960's with the advent of the
cognitive revolution
o Kosslyn's mental scanning experiments suggested that imagery shares the
same mechanisms as perception (that is, creates a depictive representation in
the person's mind)
• these results and others were challenged by Pylyshyn, who stated that
imagery is based on a mechanism related to language (that is, creates a
propositional representation in the person's mind)
o One of Pylyshyn's arguments against the idea of a depictive representation is
the tacit knowledge explanation, which states than when asked to image
something, people ask themselves what it would look like to see it and then
simulate this staged event
o Finke and Pinker's flasher dot experiment argued against this tacit knowledge
explanation
• The following experiments also demonstrated parallels between imagery
and perception:
▪ Size in the visual field
• Visual walk task
▪ Interaction between perception and imagery
▪ Physiological experiments
o Parallels between perception and imagery have been demonstrated
physiologically by the following methods:
• Recording from single neurons (imagery neurons)
• Brain imaging (demonstrating overlapping activation in the brain)
• Transcranial magnetic stimulation experiments
▪ Comparing the effect of brain inactivation on perception and
imagery
• Neuropsychological case studies
▪ Removal of visual cortex affects image size, unilateral neglect
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