Premium
Some Demonstrations of the Effects of Structural Descriptions in Mental Imagery *
Author(s) -
Hinton Geoffrey
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1207/s15516709cog0303_3
Subject(s) - mental image , perception , cognitive psychology , mental representation , computer science , frame (networking) , task (project management) , folding (dsp implementation) , object (grammar) , parsing , psychology , cognitive science , artificial intelligence , cognition , telecommunications , management , neuroscience , electrical engineering , economics , engineering
A visual imagery task is presented which is beyond the limits of normal human ability, and some of the factors contributing to its difficulty are isolated by comparing the difficulty of related tasks. It is argued that complex objects are assigned hierarchical structural descriptions by being parsed into parts, each of which has its own local system of significant directions. Two quite different schemas for a wire‐frame cube are used to illustrate this theory, and some striking perceptual differences to which they give rise are described. The difficulty of certain mental imagery tasks is shown to depend on which of the alternative structural descriptions of an object is used, and this is interpreted as evidence that structural descriptions are an important component of mental images. Finally, it is argued that analog transformations like mental folding involve changing the values of continuous variables in a structural description.