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    Visual Imagery: Douglas L. "Doug" Medin

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    Clay Cyril Jastiva Lambit
    Douglas Medin is a psychologist who became interested in psychology as a teenager in Iowa. He received his PhD from the University of South Dakota in 1968, with a thesis focusing on how rhesus monkeys perceive shapes. Medin's lab at Northwestern University studies culture and cognition. Propositional theory suggests that mental representations resemble abstract propositions rather than images. Mental images can be ambiguous and open to reinterpretation by shifting perspective or the reference frame. Evidence also indicates that mental images can be directly manipulated without needing a propositional representation.

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    Visual Imagery: Douglas L. "Doug" Medin

    Uploaded by

    Clay Cyril Jastiva Lambit
    90 views5 pages
    Douglas Medin is a psychologist who became interested in psychology as a teenager in Iowa. He received his PhD from the University of South Dakota in 1968, with a thesis focusing on how rhesus monkeys perceive shapes. Medin's lab at Northwestern University studies culture and cognition. Propositional theory suggests that mental representations resemble abstract propositions rather than images. Mental images can be ambiguous and open to reinterpretation by shifting perspective or the reference frame. Evidence also indicates that mental images can be directly manipulated without needing a propositional representation.

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    Visual Imagery

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    Visual-Imagery-Ppt

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    Douglas Medin is a psychologist who became interested in psychology as a teenager in Iowa. He received his PhD from the University of South Dakota in 1968, with a thesis focusing on how rhesus monkeys perceive shapes. Medin's lab at Northwestern University studies culture and cognition. Propositional theory suggests that mental representations resemble abstract propositions rather than images. Mental images can be ambiguous and open to reinterpretation by shifting perspective or the reference frame. Evidence also indicates that mental images can be directly manipulated without needing a propositional representation.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    90 views5 pages

    Visual Imagery: Douglas L. "Doug" Medin

    Uploaded by

    Clay Cyril Jastiva Lambit
    Douglas Medin is a psychologist who became interested in psychology as a teenager in Iowa. He received his PhD from the University of South Dakota in 1968, with a thesis focusing on how rhesus monkeys perceive shapes. Medin's lab at Northwestern University studies culture and cognition. Propositional theory suggests that mental representations resemble abstract propositions rather than images. Mental images can be ambiguous and open to reinterpretation by shifting perspective or the reference frame. Evidence also indicates that mental images can be directly manipulated without needing a propositional representation.

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    The passage discusses different theories about mental representations including propositional theory and the use of mental images. It also explores limitations of using mental images and ways that mental images can be manipulated.

    Propositional theory suggests that mental representations resemble abstract propositions rather than images. Imagery theory posits that we store and manipulate mental representations as images. The passage discusses evidence for both views.

    Mental images can be ambiguous and open to different interpretations. Details may be forgotten when an image is no longer visible. It can also be difficult to make comparisons based on mental images alone.

    Visual Imagery

    Douglas L. "Doug" Medin


    Born: June 13, 1944
    of Psychology at
    Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois
    Medin first became interested in psychology when he was an eighth-grader
    in Algona, Iowa
    He attended Moorhead State College, graduating in 1965 with a B.A. in psychology,
    and went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of
    South Dakota in 1966 and 1968, respectively.His Ph.D. thesis focused on the way
    that rhesus monkeys perceive shapes.

    In The Lab of Doug Medin


    Our Lab focuses on culture and cognition
    Cognition-The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding
    through thought, experience, and the senses.

    Propositional Theory - is a theory expressed in a language of propositional logic. The


    logic or type of deductive system might be classical, or intuitionistic, or
    linear, etc., but for the purposes of illustration, we consider below the
    classical case.
     Suggest that we do not store mental representations in the form of images or
    mere words.
     We may experience our mental representation's as images, but these images are
    Epiphenomena secondary and derivative phenomena that occur as a result of
    Other more cognitive basic processes.

    According to Propositional theory


    Our mental representations (sometimes called “mentalese”) more closely resemble
    the abstract form of a proposition.

    What is a Proposition?
    • Underlying a particular relationship among concepts
    • Logicians have devised a shorthand means (called “predicate calculus”) of
    expressing the underlying meaning of a relationship
    Limitations of Mental Images

    What are the limits to analogical representation of images? For Example:


    Look closely at this figure and then look away.
    Does figure contain a parallelogram (a four sided figure that
    has two pairs of parallel lines of equal length)?
    Participants in one study looked at figures such as this
    one. They had to determine whether particular shapes
    (e.g., a parallelogram) were or were not part of a given
    whole figure (Reed 1974).

    Can Mental Images Can Be Ambiguous?

    a. Look closely at the rabbit, then cover it with your


    hand and recreate it in your mind. Can you see a
    different animal in this image just by mentally
    shifting your perspective?

    b. What animal do you observe in this figure? Create


    a mental image of this figure, and try to imagine
    the front end of this animal as the back of end of
    another animal and the tail of this animal as the
    front of other animal.

    c. Observe the animal in this figure, and create a


    mental image of the animal; cover the figure, and
    try to reinterpret your mental image as a different
    kind of animal (both animals are probably being facing
    in the same direction).
    Limitations of Propositional Theory
    In contrast to the work discussed, some evidence indicates that we do not necessarily
    need a propositional code to manipulate information, but we can manipulate mental
    imagery directly.

    The Influence of Semantic Labels. Semantic labels clearly influence mental images, as
    shown here in the differing drawings based on mental images of objects differing
    semantic (verbal) labels.

    Participants in a study by Finke, Pinker, and Farah (1989) manipulated mental


    images by combining two distinct images to form a different mental image altogether.
    This manipulation of mental images may be thought of as an imaginal Gestalt experience.
    In the combined image, the whole of the two combined images differed from the sum of
    its two distinct parts. The study showed that in some situations, mental images can be
    combined effectively to create mental images. The images may be of geometric shapes or
    of objects.

    They believe that the mental reinterpretation of ambiguous figures involves two
    manipulation:
    1. The first is the mental realignment reference frame. This realignment would
    involve a shift in the positional orientations of the figures in mental “page” or
    “screen” on which the image is displayed
    2. The second manipulation is a mental reconstrual (reinterpretation) of parts of
    the figure. This reconstrual would be of the duck’s bill as the rabbit’s ears.

    What are the supporting Hints?


    1. Implicit Reference Frame Hint. Participants first were shown another ambiguous
    figure involving realignment of the reference.
    2. Explicit Reference Frame Hint. Participants were asked to modify the reference
    frame by considering either “the back of the head of the animal they had already
    seen as the front of the head of some other animal” or “the front of the thing
    you were seeing as the back of something else.
    3. Attentional Hint. Participants were directed to attend to regions of the figure
    where alignments or reconstruals were to occur.
    4. Construals from “good” parts. Participants were asked to construe an image from
    parts determined to be “good”, rather than from parts determined to be “bad”.

    Mental Manipulations of Images


    Functional- equivalence hypothesis – although visual imagery is not identical
    to visual perception, it is functionally equivalent to it.

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