Components of Mental Imagery Representation.
Abstract
The key question asked here was, Is mental imagery ability an undifferentiated general skill, or is it composed of a number of distinct subabilities? Further, if imagery is not an undifferentiated general ability, can its structure be understood in terms of the processing components posited by the Kosslyn & Shwartz theory of imagery representation? A set of tasks was administered to a group of 50 people, and a model was specified for each task. These models invoked different combinations of the processing components posited by the theory. Each subject was assigned a z score on each measure. The z scores from the different tasks were then correlated, revealing a very wide range of coefficients--which suggests that the subjects were not simply good or poor at imagery in general. In addition, the similarity of each pair of processing models was computed by considering the number of common processing components posited by the theory. The correlation s among z scored were then compared to the predicted similarities in processing, and were found to be highly related to these measures. This result suggests that the z scores for task performance in part reflected the efficiency of the underlying processing components, and that for a given persons tasks sharing more components tended to be similar in difficulty. Thus, imagery ability is not an undifferentiated general skill, and the underlying components bear a strong correspondence to those posited by the theory. Various additional analyses, considering alternative conceptions and different ways of treating the data, supported these conclusions. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 24, 1983
- Accession Number
- ADA124616
Entities
People
- Jennifer L. Brunn
- Kyle R. Cave
- Roger W. Wallach
- Stephen M. Kosslyn
Organizations
- Brandeis University