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=P9d...
Biederman (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?do...
Marr (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. books.google.com/books?id=D8X...
Treisman & Gelade (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Kosslyn (1975). Information representation in visual images. www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Kosslyn, Ball & Reiser (1978). Visual images preserve metric spatial information: evidence from studies of image scanning. psycnet.apa.org/record/1979-0...
Shepard & Metzler (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. www.jstor.org/stable/1731476

[@NothingButThought]

I think my thought process for the rabbit direction was actually: 1. remember they were facing each other 2. remember the elephant was facing right 3. concluding that the rabbit must have faced left The process was way to fast, to be sure about what happened, but that's how it felt like, when I thought about it afterwards.

[@kwikitti]

Excellent lecture. Just what I was looking for to share with a young friend so we can discuss the vagaries of human visual perception.

[@Brunofromaraguari]

New subscriber from Brazil. Thank you for the videos

[@senseofmindshow]

Awesome lecture. Thanks, Ryan!

[@smumemoryclass3429]

Brilliant!!

[@ahmedtaha6431]

Keep going pro 💕❤️

[@destee6523]

Help tell me where to find free books on mental imagery

[@TheMikeyD31813]

did you make that intro music?

[@RYANRHODES-cogsci]

I commissioned it from a friend! He and I actually met at an event where Stephen Pinker was giving a talk :)

[@tesafilm8447]

Isn't it actually a logical fallacy to argue that : if we do operation A, it takes a certain amount of time. It took this certain amount of time, therefore operation A was done and not some other operation. This does count as abductive reasoning, but isn't actually a valid inference. We can only conclude that: given it didn't take this certain amount of time, operation A wasn't done. And in this particular case it just tells us that the mathematical transformation wasn't done, however we don't know whether mental rotation via 3d imagery is the only other way of figuring out rotations problems, and so we can't conclude that it is indeed the right model only by ruling out another