Mental Imagery

Light enters our eyes and is converted to a code that our minds can understand, but what happens then? How do our minds generate and manipulate mental imagery to recognize objects and perform other important cognitive tasks? In this video, we’ll go over some models of visual object recognition and talk about some specific ways the mind can manipulate mental images (and how we know!).

0:00 – Intro
2:44 – Template matching
5:40 –Recognition by components
10:51 – Feature integration
17:49 – Mental imagery
19:55 – Zoom
23:55 – Scan
25:39 – Mental rotation
30:00 – Key concepts

Sources:
Friedenberg & Silverman (2021). Cognitive Science: An introduction to the study of the mind. Chapter 4. books.google.com/books?id=P9dDEAAAQBAJ&lpg
Biederman (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-295x…
Marr (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. books.google.com/books?id=D8XxCwAAQBAJ&lpg
Treisman & Gelade (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00100285…
Kosslyn (1975). Information representation in visual images. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00100285…
Kosslyn, Ball & Reiser (1978). Visual images preserve metric spatial information: evidence from studies of image scanning. psycnet.apa.org/record/1979-00241-001
Shepard & Metzler (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. www.jstor.org/stable/1731476