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NEOMENTALISM
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Title: NEOMENTALISM
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NEOMENTALISM
- David Pearson
- Room T10, William Guild Building
- d.g.pearson_at_abdn.ac.uk
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- I would have you imagine, then, that there
exists in the mind of man a block of
wax.......When we wish to remember anything which
we have seen, or heard, or thought in our own
minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and
thoughts, and in that material receive the
impression of them as from the seal of a ring
and...... we remember and know what is imprinted
as long as the image lasts but when the image is
effaced or cannot be taken, then we forget and do
not know. Plato, Theatetus.
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- Plato uses the metaphor of a wax tablet to try
and explain how the mind stores sensory
information. - He suggests there is a relationship between the
structure of the copies and the structure of the
stimuli which give rise to them. - Similar to the modern theory that there is a
relationship between the organisation of images
and the organisation of percepts.
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WHAT EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE IS THERE THAT IMAGES
ARE ORGANISED IN A SIMILAR FASHION TO PERCEPTS ?
- During the 1970s a research movement developed
called neomentalism (Paivio, 1975) - Prior to this imagery had mainly been studied
using introspection i.e., Galtons imagery
questionnaire (1883).
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Galtons breakfast-table Questionnaire (1883)
- Think of some definite object suppose it is
your breakfast-table as you sat down to it this
morning and consider carefully the picture that
rises before your minds eye. - Illumination. Is the image dim or fairly clear?
- Distance of images. Where do mental images appear
to be situated? - Command over images. Can you retain a mental
picture steadily before the eyes? - Full questionnaire consists of 14 items in total.
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- Main problem with introspection is that it
produces subjective rather than objective data. - Neomentalism attempted to rectify this by using
experimental techniques first developed in the
field of psychophysics. - Psychophysics collected behavioural data (i.e.,
response times, accuracy scores) for decisions
based on sensory stimuli - Neomentalism collected behavioural data for
decisions based on images rather than percepts.
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- Neomentalism used three main experimental
methodologies - Mental rotation
- Mental scanning
- Mental comparisons
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Mental Rotation
- First demonstrated by Shepard and Metzler in
1971. - Presented participants with pairs of identical or
enantiomorphic (mirror-reversed) objects in
different orientations. Had to decide whether
pairs were identical or different.
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Mental Rotation Results (Shepard Metzler, 1971)
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- Mental rotation appeared to display the same
attributes as physical rotation of objects in the
real world. - Images are like some quasi-perceptual simulacrum
of the 3-D object (Boden, 1988). - However, some studies show that mental rotation
does not exactly duplicate the physical rotation
of objects in the real world - - effects of visual complexity on accuracy of
rotation (Rock, 1973)
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Effects of complexity on mental rotation (Rock,
1973)
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- Mental rotation appeared to display the same
attributes as physical rotation of objects in the
real world. - Images are like some quasi-perceptual simulacrum
of the 3-D object (Boden, 1988). - However, some studies show that mental rotation
does not exactly duplicate the physical rotation
of objects in the real world - - effects of visual complexity on accuracy of
rotation (Rock, 1973) - - even a simple cube can be very difficult to
- mentally rotate correctly (Hinton, 1979)
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Mental Scanning
- Kosslyn, Ball Reiser (1978) asked participants
to imagine a small black dot travelling between
landmarks on a mental image of a fictitious
island.
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- The mental image of map appeared to preserve the
spatial characteristics of the original picture. - However.
- I have a nagging concern that implicitly, much
of the experimental work in this field consists
of instructing the subject to behave as if he
were seeing something in the outside
world.......Whether such results tell us how the
system works, or indeed tell us much about the
phenomenology, I am as yet uncertain. Baddeley
(1986)
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- Critics have argued that the results are entirely
due to participants tacit knowledge (Pylyshyn,
1973 1984)
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- Critics have argued that the results are entirely
due to participants tacit knowledge (Pylyshyn,
1973 1984) - Some support for this comes from the work of
Mitchell Richman (1980). - Other mental scanning experiments are less
vulnerable to this criticism because they do not
explicitly instruct participants to use imagery
e.g., Finke Pinker (1982).
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Mental Comparisons
- This type of task requires comparative judgements
about objects or concepts, without any form of
external perceptual referent being available. - First carried out by Moyer (1973), who asked
people to decide which of two animals would
usually be the larger. - Found that people took systematically longer to
decide for animals of similar size (i.e., Hamster
- Mouse) compared to animals where differences in
size were larger (i.e., Dog - Elephant).
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- This was termed symbolic distance effect (Moyer
Bayer, 1976). - Results of mental comparisons mimicked results
for perceptual comparisons of real objects
(Woodworth Sclosberg, 1954 Curtis, Paulos
Rule, 1973).
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Perceptual comparisons of size
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- This was termed symbolic distance effect (Moyer
Bayer, 1976). - Results of mental comparisons mimicked results
for perceptual comparisons of real objects
(Woodworth Sclosberg, 1954 Curtis, Paulos
Rule, 1973). - Suggested that people made mental comparisons
using image-based psychophysical judgements. - Results replicated by Paivio (1975). Also
reported picture superiority and picture
incongruency effects.
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Picture Superiority Effect
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Picture Incongruency Effect
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Picture Incongruency Effect
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- Critics argue that mental comparisons are based
on semantic memory, not imagery (Banks Flora,
1977) - Presence of a semantic congruity effect supports
the involvement of abstract language-like
representations, not imagery (Banks, 1977). - Participants faster to decide which of two items
would be smaller if both could be considered
small in an absolute sense. Similar effect found
for comparisons of larger objects. - - Mouse - Ant
- - Elephant - Whale
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- Symbolic distance effects can be produced for
comparisons of almost any attribute, regardless
of whether it is concrete or abstract. This
includes - monetary value of cars, ferocity of animals,
military power of countries (Kerst Howard,
1977) - units of time temperature, and measures of
quality (Holyoak Walker, 1976) - friendliness (Potts, 1974)
- alphabetic ordering of letters (Lovelace
Snodgrass, 1971) - intelligence of animals (Banks Flora, 1977)
- pleasantness (Paivio, 1978)
- emotional reactions to abstract word-pairs
(Friedman, 1978)
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- Kerst Howard (1977) argue that SDEs result from
any mental comparison made on an ordered
dimension, and are neither indicative of analogue
processing, or the adoption of a specific imagery
strategy. - But.
- The neomentalists struck back. Argued that
imagery is used in conjunction with searches in
semantic memory, and performs a functional role
in situations in which it can explicitly
represent information which is only implicitly
encoded within semantic memory.
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Explicit and Implicit Mental Comparisons
- Questions about a fox
- Does a fox have four legs?
- Does a fox have reddish fur?
- What shape are a foxs ears?
- What length is a foxs tail in proportion to the
rest of its body?
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