IMAGERY IS LIKE PERCEPTION
Imagery is much like perception. The idea is that in a bottom-up process you have memory representations. You don't usually have a memory representation unless you first have a visual experience (e.g., you can recall what your parents house looks like). He made a quick explanation that we do actually remember auditory experience as well, without a visual representation.
Confusability
Perky took people and had them sit in front of a screen and imagine a banana. A banana that is as lifelike as possible. Unknown to the subjects he very faintly flashed a banana on the screen and then asked them what type of banana they imagined. And in almost every case they described the banana that was flashed on the screen. This shows evidence that vision and memory are very similar processes.
Other evidence for the similarity between vision and memory would be giving someone a high imagery phrase and a low imagery phrase. Visual interference task shows subjects a 1 or 2 and have to remember the other number. Auditory interference does the same but with sound. Visual interfering task causes a big effect on high imagery pairs and auditory interfering task causes a big effect on low imagery pairs. (Sorry if this is a bad description, I didn't understand his explanation very well).
Damage
Damage to ventral impairs visual imagery and damage to dorsal impairs spatial imagery.
IMAGERY IS NOT LIKE PERCEPTION
Heuristics
The rotation heuristic is where we imagine things that are tilted as much more straight then they really are. The alignment heuristic is where we believe that Philadelphia is further north than Rome when it is not.
Some of the things that imagery allows you to do is mental inspection. When we do mental transformations we are able to get them correct about 60% of the time. The point is that images can be inspected to some extent but it is not as clear as perception.
Distortions, inspection and it is difficult are reasons it is not like perception.
WHY DO WE HAVE IMAGERY?
Memory
One idea is that it helps with memory. We remember words that are concrete better than abstract words because we can make a mental image of them. Mentioned the dual coding process as a process where you only have meaning with abstract words but there is an image with concrete words so with an image you can do deeper semantic processing.
Another idea is that if you have concrete words you can imagine them interacting bizarrely to help with memory. Of course this is non conclusive but some of the evidence shows that bizarre interaction helps memory more than non-bizarre interaction.
Make Implicit Knowledge Conscious
Imagery helps us take implicit knowledge and make it conscious knowledge. For example, is the writing on the coca-colo logo cursive? To answer this question most people will visualize the coke can to remember the writing. So the answer to a question like this is in an image that we remember but we have yet to encode and extract this specific information, per se.
Prepare for Future Actions
One reason to have visual imagery is so that we can prepare for future situations. For example trying to decide if a bed will fit into a room. How do we do that? We imagine it.
Imagery is much like perception. The idea is that in a bottom-up process you have memory representations. You don't usually have a memory representation unless you first have a visual experience (e.g., you can recall what your parents house looks like). He made a quick explanation that we do actually remember auditory experience as well, without a visual representation.
Confusability
Perky took people and had them sit in front of a screen and imagine a banana. A banana that is as lifelike as possible. Unknown to the subjects he very faintly flashed a banana on the screen and then asked them what type of banana they imagined. And in almost every case they described the banana that was flashed on the screen. This shows evidence that vision and memory are very similar processes.
Other evidence for the similarity between vision and memory would be giving someone a high imagery phrase and a low imagery phrase. Visual interference task shows subjects a 1 or 2 and have to remember the other number. Auditory interference does the same but with sound. Visual interfering task causes a big effect on high imagery pairs and auditory interfering task causes a big effect on low imagery pairs. (Sorry if this is a bad description, I didn't understand his explanation very well).
Damage
Damage to ventral impairs visual imagery and damage to dorsal impairs spatial imagery.
IMAGERY IS NOT LIKE PERCEPTION
Heuristics
The rotation heuristic is where we imagine things that are tilted as much more straight then they really are. The alignment heuristic is where we believe that Philadelphia is further north than Rome when it is not.
Some of the things that imagery allows you to do is mental inspection. When we do mental transformations we are able to get them correct about 60% of the time. The point is that images can be inspected to some extent but it is not as clear as perception.
Distortions, inspection and it is difficult are reasons it is not like perception.
WHY DO WE HAVE IMAGERY?
Memory
One idea is that it helps with memory. We remember words that are concrete better than abstract words because we can make a mental image of them. Mentioned the dual coding process as a process where you only have meaning with abstract words but there is an image with concrete words so with an image you can do deeper semantic processing.
Another idea is that if you have concrete words you can imagine them interacting bizarrely to help with memory. Of course this is non conclusive but some of the evidence shows that bizarre interaction helps memory more than non-bizarre interaction.
Make Implicit Knowledge Conscious
Imagery helps us take implicit knowledge and make it conscious knowledge. For example, is the writing on the coca-colo logo cursive? To answer this question most people will visualize the coke can to remember the writing. So the answer to a question like this is in an image that we remember but we have yet to encode and extract this specific information, per se.
Prepare for Future Actions
One reason to have visual imagery is so that we can prepare for future situations. For example trying to decide if a bed will fit into a room. How do we do that? We imagine it.
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