Cognition: Imagery &

problem-solving
Introduction to Psychology
HUL261, Semester II, 2022-2023
Lecture 18
March 29, 2023

1
 Outline for today’s lecture
• Mental imagery
• Spatial imagery
References:
• Synesthesia - Sinnett, S., Smilek, D., & Kingstone, A.
Cognition. London, UK: Oxford University
• Problem-solving Press. 2016.
• Insight and creativity - Goldstein, E. Bruce. Cognitive
psychology. Connecting mind, research,
• Imperfections of decision-making and everyday experience. Fifth Edition.
Cengage Learning. 2018.
- Ciccarelli, Saundra K., & White, J.
Noland. Psychology. Fifth Edition.
Pearson Education Learning. 2018.
(Ciccarelli et al.)
 “Cognition” has infiltrated the common
lingo

So what exactly is “Cognition”?

Google images 3
 What is cognition?
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge
and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses".

Memory Problem-solving

Language comprehension Decision-making

Attention Perception Learning

Stimulus Response
Language Speaking

4
 What is the ‘mind’?
• When do we use the word ‘mind’ in everyday conversation?
• The mind is involved in memory (“They were able to call to mind…”)
• The mind helps in solving problems (“If you put your mind to it, you can solve…”)
• The mind helps in making decisions (“I haven’t made up my mind yet”)
• A healthy mind is associated with normal functioning (“They are of sound mind and body”)
• The mind is valuable (“A mind is a terrible thing to waste”, “They have a brilliant mind”)
• Consider these two compatible definitions of the ‘mind’:
• The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory,
emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning – this definition refers to the mental
processes that the mind creates
• The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it
to achieve our goals – this definition indicates how the mind operates

5
 What is mental imagery?
• Try answering these questions:
• Are an elephant’s ears rounded or pointy?
• In our national anthem, is the pause between ‘… gana mana [here] adhinayak jaya …’ longer than
the pause between ‘… jaya he [here] bharat bhagya …’
• You can answer these questions because you can ‘see’ an elephant in your mind and
‘play’ a song in your mind – this is mental imagery
• Mental imagery refers to the ability to access or reactivate perceptual information from
memory, as well as the ability to dynamically manipulate this information for the purposes
of planning, reasoning, inference, or flights of fancy
• Simply put, mental imagery refers to the ability to re-create the sensory world in the
absence of physical stimuli
• So what is the relationship between ‘actual’ seeing (perception) and seeing in our mind’s
eye (imagery)?
 Overlap between perception and imagery
• Perky et al. (1910) asked her participants to “project” visual images of
common objects onto a screen and then to describe these images
• Unknown to the participants, Perky was back-projecting a very dim image of
this object onto the screen. Thus, when participants were asked to create an
image of a banana, Perky projected a dim image of a banana onto the screen
• Interestingly, the participants’ descriptions of their images matched the
images that Perky was projecting. For e.g., they described the banana as
being oriented vertically, just as was the projected image
• Even more interesting, not one of Perky’s 24 participants noticed that there
was an actual picture on the screen. They had apparently mistaken an actual
picture for a mental image!
• Le Bihan and coworkers (1993), demonstrated that both perception and
imagery activate the visual cortex
• Kosslyn and coworkers (1999) disrupted the visual cortex using TMS during
perception and imagery and found that it slowed responses in both
• So imagery same as perception?
8
 Dissociation between perception &
imagery
• Probably not! Perception and imagery have different properties:
• Perception is automatic but imagery needs effort
• Perception is stable but imagery is fragile – it can vanish without continued effort
• Both activate similar brain regions but during perception there is more widespread
activation
• Chalmers and Reisberg (1985), asked their participants to create mental images of
ambiguous figures such as the one which can be seen as a rabbit or a duck
• Perceptually, it is fairly easy to “flip” between these two perceptions. However, they
found that participants who were holding a mental image of this figure were unable to flip
from one perception to another
• Patient R.M. who had suffered damage to his occipital and parietal lobes had normal
perception but impaired imagery (Farah et al., 1988)
• R.M. was able to recognize objects and to draw accurate pictures of objects that were
placed before him. However, he had trouble answering questions that depend on
imagery, such as verifying whether “A grapefruit is larger than an orange”
• Conversely, there are other patients who are able to draw from memory (imagery) but
unable to identify objects placed in front of him (perception)
9
 Mental rotation
• But we can manipulate images in our mind, for e.g., saying whether these two objects
are same or different
• How do we do this – are we mentally rotating it one step at a time?
• Shepard and Metzler (1971) presented participants with 1600 pairs of line drawings
• Half the pairs showed the same object and half showed different objects. The pairs of
drawings of the same object varied in the angular rotation that would be required in
order to bring the two images into alignment. The angular rotation varied from 0° to
180° through 20° intervals
• For both picture-plane and depth pairs, the greater the angular rotation required, the
longer was the participant’s RT
• They concluded that participants used a process called mental rotation. The greater
the angular rotation required, the longer it would take to imagine the rotation of one of
the pairs until it came into alignment with the other
• On the basis of their data, it appears that the speed of mental rotation in this task was
60° per second
10
 Spatial imagery
• How do we imagine spatial locations and relationships?
• For e.g., does the time taken to mentally scan from one location to another depend
on the real distance?
• Kosslyn et al (1978) asked participants to memorize a map of an island that
contained seven different locations. Some of the distances between various
locations were longer than others, e.g., distance from the hut to the beach >
distance from the hut to the tree
• Participants were asked to imagine one of the locations on their memory image of
the map. Then they were to imagine “zip” from that location to another location.
Sometimes they were asked to scan to locations that were not on the map
• For example, they might imagine the hut and then be asked to scan from the hut to
the beach (which is on the map) or from the hut to a location that is not on the map.
If they could find the location, they pressed one button, and if they could not find it
they pressed another button
• Participants took longer to scan between places that were farther apart on the real
map. This might mean that objective distances are preserved in our mental images
of perceived scenes
11
 Spatial imagery
• Does the ability to perceive details in mental images depend on imagined viewing
distance?
• Kosslyn et al (1978) asked participants to imagine two animals next to one other in
two conditions. Say, a rabbit and an elephant, and a rabbit and a fly. He asked to
imagine that they were standing close enough so that the larger animal filled most of
their visual field
• He then posed questions such as “Does the rabbit have whiskers?”
• Participants’ RT were quicker for rabbit and fly compared to rabbit and elephant
suggesting that imagined viewing distance affected the ability to perceive details
• Farah et al (1993) reported about a patient doing an imagery task, before and after
removal of right occipital cortex
• She had to imagine a horse and report the viewing distance at which the horse
overflowed from her visual field
• Before the surgery, the patient could be about 15 feet away from the horse
• But after the surgery, she had to be about 35 feet away from the horse again
suggesting the visual field affects mental imagery 12
 Synesthesia
• Synesthesia is a condition in which a stimulus appropriate to one sense (e.g., a sound)
triggers an experience appropriate to another sense (e.g., a colour)
• People who experience synesthesia in everyday life are called synesthetes, and the most
common experience that they report is chromesthesia, or coloured hearing. This is the
experience of colour in response to an auditory stimulus
• Synesthesia is exists in ~4% of the population. Synesthesia appears to run in families, and
occurs more often in women than in men. Aside from their exceptional crossmodal
experience, synesthetes have normal cognitive abilities and brain activation
• Some psychedelic substances such as LSD and mescaline and even cannabis may induce
synesthesia
• Kadosh et al. (2007) tested synasthestic experience on a I.S., a digit–colour synesthete.
The number was presented in either I.C.’s concurrent (congruent display) or in a different
color (incongruent). They were asked to name the digit that was triggered by the coloured
font
• RT was slower for incongruent display but this effect was pronounced for small digits -
smaller numbers are more discriminable with faster access of their numerical value and
larger interference
Simner 2013; Front. Psychol. 2013; 4: 558; doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00558
Kadosh & Henik 2007; TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.11 No.4; doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.01.003 13
Grossenbacher and C.T. Lovelace; Trends Cogn. Sci., 5 (2001), pp. 36-41
Subjective experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNy23tJMTzQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEqmNX8uKlA
Patient description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKLDfbgEhiM

WATCH LATER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A91tvp0b1fY

15
 Problem & problem-solving
• A problem occurs when there is an obstacle between a present state and a goal
and it is not immediately obvious how to get around the obstacle
• Amongst others, problem-solving strategies might involve using:
• Algorithms – A step-by-step procedure which involves following some rules, e.g.,
maths
• Heuristics – Shortcut strategies, e.g., switch lanes when in a traffic jam
• Trial and error – Ruling out potential solutions one by one, e.g., figuring out
someone’s PIN number
• Insight – Suddenly getting to the solution, i.e., the ‘Aha’ moment
• Gestalt psychologists considered that problem solving depends on (1) how
people represent a problem in their mind and (2) how this representation is
reorganization or restructuring (‘Gestalt switch’)
• The experience you have when a bi-stable figure suddenly changes from one
stable configuration (the young woman) to the other (the old woman) is a
Gestalt switch

16
 Obstacles to Problem-Solving
• Assumptions – Making assumption about constraints
• Fixation – Representing the problem in a fixed way
• Irrelevant information – Focusing on unimportant information
• Mental set – Using solutions that have worked in the past rather than
alternative ideas
• Luchins gave people problems to solve (e.g. using these 3 jugs measure
out 100 quarts)
• Problems 1-6 could be solved as Desired amount = B - A - 2C
• Problems 7 and 8 could also be solved by the B - A - 2C formula, but could
also be solved more simply as A + C and A – C, respectively
• They found that participants who had not been exposed to problems 1-6 all
used the simpler solutions
• However, only 23% participants who had been exposed to problems 1-6
used the simpler solution
 Functional fixedness
• Problem solving might require overcoming fixation – people’s tendency to focus on a specific
characteristic of the problem that keeps them from arriving at a solution
• One type of fixation that can work against solving a problem, focusing on familiar functions or uses
of an object, is called functional fixedness
• For e.g., consider the problem: You are in a room with a vertical corkboard mounted on the wall. You
are given the material – some candles, matches in a matchbox, and some board pins. Your task is
to mount a candle on the corkboard so it will burn without dripping wax on the floor
• Any ideas?
• The key insight is that, the matchbox can be used to place the candle
• Participants were given the problem with a full or empty matchbox
• Participants who were presented with empty boxes were twice as likely to solve the problem as
participants who were presented with boxes that were being used as containers
• This suggests that seeing the boxes as containers inhibited using them as supports – an example of
functional fixedness
• Thus, people’s preconceptions about the uses of objects are a type of mental set, a preconceived
notion about how to approach a problem, which is determined by a person’s experience of what has
worked in the past
18
 Experts vs. novices
• Knowledge of experts is organized differently compared to that of novices
• Chase and Simon demonstrated that experts was better at remembering chess piece arrangement
compared to beginners (probably because of chunking)
• Chi et al. (1981; 1982) presented 24 physics problems to experts (physics professors) and novices
(students with one semester of physics) and asked them to sort the problems into groups based on
their similarities
• Novices sorted the problems based on characteristics such as how similar the objects in the problem
(e.g. grouping two problems of inclined planes)
• In contrary, experts sorted problems based on general principles of physics (e.g. grouping two
problems involving principle of conservation of energy, even though the diagrams indicate that one
problem involved a spring and another an inclined plane)
• Experts also approach problems differently. They often get off to a slow start on a problem, because
they spend time trying to understand the problem rather than immediately trying to solve it (Lesgold,
1988). Although this may slow them down at the beginning, this strategy usually pays off in a more
effective approach to the problem
• One disadvantage of being an expert is that it may make them less open to new ways of looking at
problems. This may be why less-experienced individuals are often make revolutionary discoveries
• The difference between experts and novices hold only when problems are within an expert’s field
 Insight
• Insight (or the Aha moment) has been defined as any sudden comprehension that involves a
reorganization of a person’s mental representation of a stimulus to yield a nonobvious
interpretation
• This representational change often takes place after a period of unconscious processing
• Insights are frequently accompanied by a burst of emotion, including a highly positive surprise at
either the content or manner of the realization
• Insights often break an impasse or mental block produced because a solver initially fixated on
an incorrect solution strategy or strong but ultimately unhelpful associations of a problem
• Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987) gave insight and non-insight problems to participants and regularly
asked them to report how close they were to the solution
• For insight problems, Metcalfe and Wiebe used problems like the triangle problem (‘how to move
three of the dots to get the triangle to point to the bottom’)
• For non-insight problems, Metcalfe and Wiebe used algebra problems which could be solved
analytically using techniques based on past experience
• For the insight problems, ratings began at 2 and then didn’t change much, until all of a sudden
they jumped from 3 to 7 at the end. In contrast, for the algebra problems, the ratings began at 3
and then gradually increased until the problem was solved
Kounios & Mark Beeman, Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2014. 65:71–93; 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115154 20
 What is creativity?
• Insight often leads to creative problem solving
• Creativity require three criteria (Jung and Vartanian, 2018)
• Originality, novelty, uniqueness
• Effectiveness, usefulness, utility, value, appropriateness, meaningfulness
• Surprising
• Creativity and intelligence are related cognitive potentials but they differ on the basis of:
• Psychometric assessment:
Creativity is commonly assessed with divergent thinking tasks asking participants to generate creative
solutions to open-ended problems, and performance can be scored for the fluency, originality, flexibility, and
creative quality of ideas, etc.
Intelligence is commonly assessed by close-ended problems that have single correct solutions and that can
be solved in an analytical way
• Real-world outcomes:
Creative cognitive potential predicts real-world creative achievements
Intelligence is a reliable predictor of academic and job performance

Benedek et al. The neural bases of creativity and intelligence: common ground and difference. Neuropsychologia 118 (2018) 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.09.006 21
 Understanding creative problem solving
• Creative problem-solving may include these stages (Jung and Vartanian, 2018) :
• Preparation – The creator starts by recognizing that there is a problem
• Incubation – They encounter difficulties that then lead to the incubation period in which the
individual is not consciously thinking about the problem (unconscious processing)
• Illumination – With sufficient incubation the creator may have an insight
• Verification – This illumination phase must be followed by the verification phase in which the
idea is tested
• Creative inventions often involve analogical problem solving where using the solution to a
similar problem is used to guide solution of a new problem
• Generating ideas is a crucial part of the creative process where a problem is identified
• When Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1914, was asked how he
got ideas, he replied, “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of
them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away”
• During creative problem-solving too much knowledge can lead to fixation
https://99designs.com/blog/creative-thinking/what-is-creativity/ 22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVdnt1wQSOg
 Conclusion
• Mental imagery and how it relates to perception
• Object and spatial imagery
• Synesthesia
• Problem-solving and obstacles to problem-solving
• Functional fixedness
• Insight and creativity