Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University / The purpose of this "study is to determine the relationship between mental imagery derived from real experience selections and mental imagery derived from vicarious experience selections. This study attempts to discover the mental imagery of the subjects tested through the component parts of mental imagery, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory imagery. The comparison is to be made between mental imagery derived from silent reading based upon a real experience background and mental imagery derived from silent reading based upon a vicarious experience background. By real experience is meant experience of a type frequently engaged in by schoolchildren. By vicarious experience is meant experience which in substance is unlikely to have been encountered directly or at all by the subjects of the experiment.

Gambling is a serious problem that affects the individual as well as the whole society. Multiple studies have investigated the effect of imagery tasks on gambling behavior. Whiting and Dixon (2013) investigated the effect of a gambling-related imagery task verses a laundry-related imagery task on gambling behavior. The current study extended Whiting and Dixon’s findings by comparing different outcome-specific imagery tasks on gambling behavior. The study included two groups: 1) winning imagery group (n=7), and 2) losing imagery group (n=7). Participants in the winning imagery group imagined themselves winging for 15 trials, while participants in the losing imagery group imagined themselves losing for 15 trials. Then both groups were given the opportunity to play a game of blackjack downloaded on a laptop for as long as they desired. Gambling intensity was measured by the total time played and the number of trials played. The Participants in the winning imagery group gambled significantly longer (p= 0.01) and played significantly more trials (p= 0.03) than those in the losing imagery group. Implications for pathological gambling treatment are discussed.

No description available.

OBJECTIVE: Prior surgical studies have established functional neuroimaging as a validated method to examine brain activation patterns as well as distinctions between novice and expert surgeons during physical skills in surgery. The purpose of this study is to examine brain activation during cognitive surgical tasks. Our study utilizes simulated operative dictations to determine which brain regions are activated by this task and to distinguish different levels of expertise. METHODS: Junior residents (PGY 1-3), senior residents (PGY 4-5), and attendings were recruited for this study. Demographic questions and case characteristics were obtained. Participants sat in a quiet room and baseline measurements were taken. Then, they were tasked to perform a simulated operative dictation of a routine, open inguinal hernia repair utilizing the Lichtenstein technique. Three trials were completed with a two-minute rest between repetitions. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure brain activation during salient events of the operative dictation. Optode montage (developed during preliminary testing) covered prefrontal, occipital, and sensorimotor regions. Measurement of the fluctuations in deoxyhemoglobin and oxyhemoglobin concentrations during the cognitive task was obtained for each participant. Homer3 and AtlasViewer toolboxes were used to process raw data and changes in deoxygenated hemoglobin were evaluated relative to baseline. A general linear model (p < 0.05 and q < 0.05) was used to evaluate group-level differences. RESULTS: Ten participants were recruited for each group. Areas of increased and decreased brain activation were identified. Senior residents had significantly more activation in premotor areas, including supplementary motor area, parietal area, and right frontal area, compared to junior residents. Attendings demonstrated significantly less brain activation in medial frontal areas compared to the both junior and senior residents. CONCLUSION: Functional neuroimaging can examine cognitive functions during simulated operative dictations (a cognitive surgical task) and discern differences for various levels of expertise. This study is the first to connect mental imagery to neuroimaging analysis of cognitive function.

Recreational athletes are encouraged to use mental imagery by their coaches less frequently than elite athletes (Jedlic, Hall, Munroe-Chandler, & Hall, 2007). The purpose of this study was to examine whether a mental imagery workshop would increase recreational level coaches’ encouragement of imagery to their athletes when compared to coaches attending a communication workshop. The workshops provided coaches with imagery or communication information and tools as well as role-playing opportunities. Recreational sport coaches (N = 132; M age = 41.80 years, SD = 9.67) completed the Coaches Encouragement of Athletes Imagery Use Questionnaire (CEAIUQ; Jedlic et al.), Coach-Athlete Relationship Questionnaire (CART-Q; Jowett & Ntoumanis, 2004), and questionnaires assessing coaches’ demographics, confidence, knowledge, and attitudes towards imagery. These questionnaires were completed before the workshop and online four weeks later. Repeated measure MANCOVAs, controlling for sex and highest level coached, were performed comparing the coaches’ encouragement of imagery use, as well as their confidence, attitudes, and knowledge of mental imagery, across the two study groups. No group by time interactions were found for any of the five functions of imagery. However, group by time interactions were found for knowledge (F(1, 132) = 5.45, p = .02, ηp2 = .040), attitudes (F(1,132) = 4.45, p = .01, ηp2 = .055) and confidence (F(1,132),= 7.10, p = .04, ηp2 = .032) towards imagery. Paired-samples t-tests demonstrated that the mental imagery group significantly increased their confidence from baseline to follow-up (t(65) = -2.75, p = .01). Findings provide direction for designing future coach education training programs and aid in understanding recreational sport coaches’ views on encouraging their athletes to use imagery. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-30 10:35:41.541

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University / Imagery may be defined as a picture seen in one's mind. It is the ability to create pictures, to hear sounds, to smell odors, to taste, and to feel in one's mind as one reads. All these factors contribute to the varying degrees of mental imagery possessed by different individuals. It may be assumed that people visualize when they read. A writer may give a description of a person or a place, and the reader can recreate the scene in his own mind. The reader's picture may be clear or it may be vague. However, since every individual is different the same sentence or paragraph may appear differently to the subjects being tested. [TRUNCATED]

This study examined the age-related ability of children (7 to 11 years) and adults to use visual imagery in tasks requiring the subprocesses of imagery generation, maintenance and inspection. Previous work had shown that young children's performance on imagery maintenance was comparable to other groups, but the level of development was inferior with tasks requiring imagery generation and inspection. We examined these findings using two newly created tasks (Line Direction and Clock Task) and one modified from previous work (Grid Task). Our data indicated that children's ability to use visual imagery generation, inspection, and maintenance was operable, but substantially below adult levels. In most cases, 7-year-olds displayed greater difficulty than their 9- and 11-year-old counterparts and adults with tasks involving response time. Our results suggest that whereas young children are capable of using the imagery subprocesses examined, at least one age-related constraint, especially with maintenance tasks, is short-term visual memory ability. We also recognize that other likely factors, especially with young children in response time situations, are attention and general information processing ability.

No description available.

Denna uppsats skrevs i syfte att undersöka den påverkan som visualisering har på riskbedömning och affekt, samt sambandet mellan affekt och riskbedömning. Fyra hypoteser testades: 1. Riskskattning vid visualisering förväntades ge högre riskskattningar än utan visualisering.  2. De som visualiserade förväntades ha mer negativ sinnesstämning än de som inte visualiserade. 3. Det förväntades finnas ett samband mellan negativ sinnesstämning och hög riskskattning. 4. Kvinnor förväntades skatta risk högre än män. Beräkningarna baseras på 347 enkäter insamlade bland studenter inom beteendevetenskapliga ämnen. Skillnaderna i riskskattning visade sig finnas i enlighet med hypotes mellan de som instruerades att visualisera och de som enbart skattade riskerna utan specifika instruktioner. Dock fanns ingen signifikant skillnad mellan visualiserings- och resoneringsinstruktioner eller mellan resoneringsinstruktioner och de utan specifika instruktioner. Ingen signifikant skillnad fanns gällande sinnesstämning. En svag korrelation fanns mellan negativ sinnesstämning och riskskattning. Riskskattningen visade sig vara högre bland kvinnorna än männen. Visualiseringsinstruktioner verkar påverka riskbedömningar i negativ riktning. Dock så fanns inte den skillnad mellan visualisering och resonerande som funnits i en tidigare studie. Angående könsskillnader vid riskbedömning ligger denna studie i linje med tidigare forskning. Det svaga sambandet mellan sinnesstämning och riskskattning pekar på att måendet och riskbedömning hänger ihop men att visualisering inte leder till ett rent användande av affektheuristik. Fler studier behövs för att förstå sambandet mellan visualisering, sinnesstämning och riskbedömning. / The purpose of this paper is to examine risk judgement and affect when using mental imagery. Four hypotheses were tested; 1. Risk judgement was expected to be higher when using mental imagery than without using mental imagery. 2. Participants who used mental imagery were expected to have a more negative mood than the ones who didn’t use mental imagery. 3. A negative correlation between mood and risk judgement was expected. 4. Women were hypothesized to give higher risk ratings than men. Calculations were made using 347 surveys from students of behavioral sciences. The hypothesized difference in risk judgement when using mental imagery was found between participants instructed to use mental imagery and those without specific instructions. However no difference was found between mental imagery instructions and reasoning instructions, or between reasoning and no instructions. No significant difference was found for mood.  A weak correlation was found between negative mood and risk judgement. Women rated risks higher than men. Both risk judgement and mood seem to be influenced negatively by mental imagery. However the difference between instructions of mental imagery and reasoning that was found in an earlier study was not present here. The sex differences were consistent with earlier studies. The weak correlation between risk judgement and mood found in this study tells us that the two are connected but mental imagery doesn’t seem to lead to usage of affect heuristics. More studies are needed to understand the connection between mental imagery, mood and risk judgement.

Mental imagery presents humans with the opportunity to predict prospective happenings based on own intended actions, to reminisce occurrences from the past and reproduce the perceptual experience. This cognitive capability is mandatory for human survival in this folding and changing world. By means of internal representation, mental imagery offers other cognitive functions (e.g., decision making, planning) the possibility to assess information on objects or events that are not being perceived. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that humans are able to employ this ability in the early stages of infancy. Although materialisation of humanoid robot employment in the future appears to be promising, comprehensive research on mental imagery in these robots is lacking. Working within a human environment required more than a set of pre-programmed actions. This thesis aims to investigate the use of mental imagery in humanoid robots, which could be used to serve the demands of their cognitive skills as in humans. Based on empirical data and neuro-imaging studies on mental imagery, the thesis proposes a novel neurorobotic framework which proposes to facilitate humanoid robots to exploit mental imagery. Through conduction of a series of experiments on mental rotation and tool use, the results from this study confirm this potential. Chapters 5 and 6 detail experiments on mental rotation that investigate a bio-constrained neural network framework accounting for mental rotation processes. They are based on neural mechanisms involving not only visual imagery, but also affordance encoding, motor simulation, and the anticipation of the visual consequences of actions. The proposed model is in agreement with the theoretical and empirical research on mental rotation. The models were validated with both a simulated and physical humanoid robot (iCub), engaged in solving a typical mental rotation task. The results show that the model is able to solve a typical mental rotation task and in agreement with data from psychology experiments, they also show response times linearly dependent on the angular disparity between the objects. Furthermore, the experiments in chapter 6 propose a novel neurorobotic model that has a macro-architecture constrained by knowledge on brain, which encompasses a rather general mental rotation mechanism and incorporates a biologically plausible decision making mechanism. The new model is tested within the humanoid robot iCub in tasks requiring to mentally rotate 2D geometrical images appearing on a computer screen. The results show that the robot has an enhanced capacity to generalize mental rotation of new objects and shows the possible effects of overt movements of the wrist on mental rotation. These results indicate that the model represents a further step in the identification of the embodied neural mechanisms that might underlie mental rotation in humans and might also give hints to enhance robots' planning capabilities. In Chapter 7, the primary purpose for conducting the experiment on tool use development through computational modelling refers to the demonstration that developmental characteristics of tool use identified in human infants can be attributed to intrinsic motivations. Through the processes of sensorimotor learning and rewarding mechanisms, intrinsic motivations play a key role as a driving force that drives infants to exhibit exploratory behaviours, i.e., play. Sensorimotor learning permits an emergence of other cognitive functions, i.e., affordances, mental imagery and problem-solving. Two hypotheses on tool use development are also conducted thoroughly. Secondly, the experiment tests two candidate mechanisms that might underlie an ability to use a tool in infants: overt movements and mental imagery. By means of reinforcement learning and sensorimotor learning, knowledge of how to use a tool might emerge through random movements or trial-and-error which might reveal a solution (sequence of actions) of solving a given tool use task accidentally. On the other hand, mental imagery was used to replace the outcome of overt movements in the processes of self-determined rewards. Instead of determining a reward from physical interactions, mental imagery allows the robots to evaluate a consequence of actions, in mind, before performing movements to solve a given tool use task. Therefore, collectively, the case of mental imagery in humanoid robots was systematically addressed by means of a number of neurorobotic models and, furthermore, two categories of spatial problem solving tasks: mental rotation and tool use. Mental rotation evidently involves the employment of mental imagery and this thesis confirms the potential for its exploitation by humanoid robots. Additionally, the studies on tool use demonstrate that the key components assumed and included in the experiments on mental rotation, namely affordances and mental imagery, can be acquired by robots through the processes of sensorimotor learning.