Visual Memory: Imagine

That ….

Naveen Kashyap, PhD

Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
Email: naveen.kashyap@iitg.ernet.in
 Visual Imagery

Visual imagery is information which passes through the

brain as though something is being perceived, when nothing
is actually happening. Someone may experience sight, smell,
sound, and touch as a result of visual imagery when none of
these stimuli are present. Visual imagery involve the use of
mnemonics
 Mnemonics and mental codes
Mnemonics involve the construction of mental pictures or images
which helps us in increasing our chances of remembering
information. There are several techniques of mnemonics.
1) Method of Loci – requires the learner to imagine a series of
places (locations) that have some sort of order to them.
e.g., suppose you want to remember a list of 10 item to shop.
Try to imagine your front door but with a huge banana instead of the usual
handle. When you open the door and walk into the entrance the floor is covered
in eggs and you have to walk over the eggs to get to the living room. Imagine the
eggs cracking under your feet and the mess! Anyway it gets much messier
because when you open the living room door you are almost knocked off your
feet by the river of milk that comes gushing out. You stagger over to the window
to pull the curtains which have turned into two giant slices of bread. You try to
turn on the TV but fail because that has been replaced by a very large packet of
cereal. Time to have a sit down, but when you collapse on the sofa you sink
down into a sofa sized ginger cake. Go to the kitchen for a drink. Walking across
the kitchen floor is a bit difficult as it is knee deep in sugar and when you have
reached the kettle you find it has turned into a bottle of wine. I prefer white but
you can visualise red if you want. Give up and go for a mug of water.
Unfortunately when you reach down a mug from the cupboard it is filled with a
bouquet of flowers and when you turn the tap on it is chocolate not water that
comes out.
 2) Technique of interacting images – states that recall of
concrete nouns on a list improved when participants will told
to form images of the words, in comparison to when they
were not given such instructions.
e.g., In a pair word recall test of the pairs dog/pipe, image of
a dog smoking pipe will make better recall than the images of
dog and pipe kept together
 3) Peg word method – it involves picturing the item with another
set of ordered “cues” – pegging them on the cue. In this case the
cues are not locations but rather nouns that come from a
memorized rhyming list.
In order to study my mnemonics generally used visual imagery
and how visual imagery functions two lines of explanation
exists

The Dual – Coding Hypothesis

Alan Paivio (1969, 71, 83) originated the dual-coding
hypothesis of memory, According to Paivio
LTM contains two distinct coding systems (or codes) for
representing information to be stored. One is verbal,
containing information about an item’s abstract, linguistic
meaning. The other involves imagery: mental pictures of
some sort that represents what the items look like. Paivio’s
idea is that pictures and concrete words give rise to both
verbal labels and visual images.
The Relational – Organizational Hypothesis
Bower (1970b) proposed the relational-organizational
hypothesis.
The theory states that imagery improved memory, not
because images are necessarily richer than verbal labels, but
because imagery produces more associations between the
item to be recalled.
Forming an image typically requires a person to create a
number of links or hooks between the information to
remember and other information.
Bower (1970) experiment to distinguish dual coding
hypothesis from the relational organizational
hypothesis
Learn Pair words train / wall Recall %

Group 1 Overt rote repetition train / wall 30%

Group 2 Image
27%

53%
Group 3 Image
Evidences for the existence of Imagery
Studies by Lee Brooks (1968) yield some of the best
evidence that images are distinct from verbal materials or at
least use different process from those used by verbal
materials
Move clockwise mentally Indicate for each word whether
from * to mark each corner it is a concrete noun or not
as top most/bottom most

A BIRD IN THE HAND IS NOT IN

*F THE BUSH
Indicate Response As
1)Verbally saying yes or no for each movement
2)Mark on list your responses as
Y Y N
N N Y
Mental Rotation of Images

One important finding for visual imagery was that people

can do more than simply create images mentally, they could
also mentally transform them
Shepard & Matzler (1971) in their experiments showed
participants line drawings of three dimensional object. On each
trial subjects would see two drawings
1) same object with one rotated by some degree
2) mirror image reversals with/without rotation
The result of the experiment showed that the amount of time it
took participants to decide if the two drawings depicted the
same object or a mirror-image reversal was directly
proportional to the angle of rotation between the drawings

The close relation between the angle of rotation of the

drawings and participants reaction times strongly suggest that
they performed the task by mental rotation of the drawing
Another question that puzzled researchers was – whether
people mentally rotate the whole/part of the image in the
mental rotation task. Lynn & Cooper (1975) using the
irregular polygon task reaction time increased linearly with
the angle of rotation and the rate of rotation was same for all
the polygons regardless of their complexity.

In another study Cooper (1976) showed that mental

rotations like physical rotations are continuous in
nature
Cognitive psychologists also started searching how people
recognize objects presented in unusual angle. One possibility
is to mentally rotate the image till it reaches the orientation of
depiction (Pinker & Tarr 1989) or that distinctive geons of the
object remain visible we can recognize them with rotation
(Biederman & Gerhardestein, 1993)
The Nature of Mental Imagery

Visual images share some properties with pictures. But what

are images, what kind of properties do images have and how
are these like and unlike the properties that real pictures have?
Ronald Finke (1989) proposed some fundamental principles
of visual imagery. They are
1) Implicit Encoding: Mental imagery is instrumental in
retrieving information about the physical properties of objects or
about physical relationships among objects that was not
explicitly encoded at previous time
2) Perceptual Equivalence: Imagery is functionally equivalent to
perception to the extent that similar mechanisms in the visual system
are activated when objects or events are imagined as when the
same objects or events are actually perceived. (e.g. Perky 1910)

3) Spatial Equivalence: The spatial arrangement of the elements of a

mental image corresponds to the way objects or their parts are
arranged on actual physical surface or in an actual physical space
(e.g., Kosslyn, 1978)
4) Transformational Equivalence: Imagined transformations
and physical transformations exhibit corresponding dynamic
characteristic and are governed by the same laws of motion
(e.g., Cooper, 1976)

5) Structural Equivalence: The structure of mental images

correspond to that of actual perceived objects, in the sense
that the structure is coherent, well organized, and can be
recognized and reinterpreted (e.g., Kosslyn, Farah & Fliegel
1983)
Critiques of Mental Imagery
There exists many critiques to mental imagery. Some of
the main themes of debate are
1) Tacit knowledge & demand characteristics
2) Picture metaphor
3) Propositional theory
Tacit Knowledge and demand characteristics

Pylyshyn (1981) argued that the result from many imagery

studies reflect participants underlying and implicit, tacit
knowledge, and beliefs about the task rather than their
construction and manipulation of visual images.

Finke (1989) with his example of moving the coffee cup

provided evidence to Pylyshyn’s claim
Pylyshyn (1981) states that tasks that are affected by people’s beliefs
and expectations are termed cognitive penetrable. Such tasks make
it obvious to participants how they ought to perform and are said to
have demand characteristics (Orne, 1962)

Sometimes experimenters unconsciously give subtle cues to

participants. Intons & Peterson (1983) called such cues as
experimenter expectancy effects.
The Picture Metaphor
Visual images are casually spoken as mental pictures, how
far is the statement true. Pylyshyn (1973) pointed out that
pictures and images differ in several ways
1) Pictures can be physically looked at without knowing what
it’s a picture of but images cannot be looked at unless you
know what it is
2) Pictures and images are disrupted & disruptable in
different ways
3) Images are more easily distorted by the viewers
interpretation
Propositional Theory

Propositional Theory – original mental imagery idea is that

mental images are a special type of encoding;
propositional theory says this is not true, that there is only
one kind of encoding, which is neither visual nor verbal.
Pylyshyn suggested that the experience of having a
mental image is really just an epiphenomenon (something
that happens with a process, but that does not cause the
process, instead is just a by-product – without the epiphen.
The process would go on just like normal – not necessary for
process to occur)
Ex. when computer is calculating something, it often has a
flashing light, but flashing light has nothing to do with the
actual computation; if light blew out, computation will still
happen, so trying to understand how and why the light
comes on and flashes will not tell us anything about how the
computations are occurring

Instead, the encoding is propositional – concepts are stored

as symbols, and what is stored is not a physical
relationship, but a conceptual one, like the network models
of memory
So it would make sense that trying to scan a path from the
flag at the back of the boat to the cabin would take less
time than scanning from the flag to the emblem, since you
would have more nodes to go thru (2 vs. 4)
So it is possible to explain scanning times without having to
use a mental image
REAR DECK (behind) CABIN (behind) FRONT DECK

(front, side of)

(back of)

RECTANGLE
FLAG
LONG FLAG PORTHOLE EMBLEM
 Spatial cognition
• Space of the body: Where are the parts of your
body located at any particular time?
• Space around the body: the area immediately
around you
• Space of navigation: larger spaces that we walk
through, travel to, and explore
• Our mental representations of these spaces may be
distorted, made “neater,” and more regular.