Cognitive

• Declarative knowledge


  Knowing that - knowledge of facts that can be stated
• Procedural knowledge


  Knowing how - knowledge of procedures that can be implemented
• Sources of empirical data on knowledge representation

  • Experimental work
  • Neuropsychological studies
• Pictures


  Aptly capture concrete and spatial information in a manner analogous to whatever they represent
• Imagery


  The mental representation of things that are currently being sensed by the sense organs
• Visual imagery


  Mental representation of visual knowledge such as objects or settings that are not presently visible to the eyes
• Mental rotations


  • Involves rotationally transforming an object's visual mental image
  • For every degree of rotation of the figures, there is a corresponding increase in the response times
  • For degraded stimulus, there is a longer response time for blurry stimuli, incomplete or otherwise less informative
  • An observed longer response time for complex items compared with simple items
• Image scanning


  • Images can be scanned, in much the same way as physical percepts can be scanned
  • Strategies and responses for imaginal scanning are expected to be functionally equivalent to those used for perceptual scanning
  • The further away from each other the objects were, the longer it took the participants to scan from one object to the other
• Heuristics in cognitive maps

  • The density of intervening landmarks increases and an estimate of distances increases correspondingly
  • Errors occur when people estimate the distance between two places to be shorter when traveling to a landmark than when traveling to a nonlandmark
  • The use of heuristics in manipulating cognitive maps suggests that propositional response affects imaginal response
• Conceptual images distort mental images through

  • Right-angle bias
  • Symmetry heuristic
  • Rotation heuristic
  • Alignment heuristic
  • Relative-position-heuristic
• Text maps


  • Creation of cognitive maps from a verbal description
  • May be as accurate as those created from looking at a graphic map
  • Construction of mental imagery may involve both processes analogous to perception, and processes relying on propositional representations
• Development of visuo-spatial skills

  • Spatial visualization is the ability to orient ourselves in our surroundings and to manipulate images of objects mentally
  • Speed of mental rotation increases with age and with a degree of familiarity with the objects
  • Enhanced response times may be the result of increasing automatization of the task across the lifespan
  • Increased speed is associated with increased accuracy in spatial memory
  • General effects of aging may lead to a reduction in response time across tasks
• Production


  Generation and output of a procedure
• Sub-routines


  Instructions for implementing a subtask within a larger task governed by a routine