Mental Imagery - Cognitive Psychology - Lecture Slides, Slides of Cognitive Psychology

Download Mental Imagery - Cognitive Psychology - Lecture Slides and more Slides Cognitive Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!

Lecture 4: Mental Imagery

Today’s Lecture:

 What is mental imagery?

 Types of imagery

 Nature and characteristics of imagery

 Uses of mental imagery

 Research into mental imagery

 Imagery debate

In psychology:

Sensation without perception

• When we read poetry it can happen
• When we ‘picture’ something
• When we ‘sing’ in our heads

There are mental images associated with each of the senses:

 Pictures (From memory, novel items)  Sounds (Speech, music, noises)  Smells (Perfume, odours)  Taste (Curry, coffee) - Smell????  Touch (Fur, sandpaper, silk)  Actions (Running, Stretching)

How many windows are on the front of your house?

Intuitively this feels like a picture in the head

Theoretically, if the person gets this right then there must be some sort of stored representation of the house. (Otherwise they would have to have already counted the windows and stored this info as a semantic fact.)

Our ability to form mental images is:

 Spontaneous - Don’t think of an elephant

 Effortless - E.g. It occurs during sleep

 Extremely Useful - Problem solving & mental practice

 Hypnagogic dreaming often occurs during the semi- conscious descent into sleep.

 It is an image-rich experience

 There have been some famous outcomes from hypnagogic dreaming...

Rene Descartes

Founder of modern mathematics

(Cartesian geometry)

Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz

German organic chemist

 Discovered the structure of Benzene

 Important in ‘performance’ settings (Sports, stage, surgery.. .)

 Mental practice refers to a particular application of mental imagery in which performers practice in their heads or rehearse their skills symbolically before actually executing them.