Individual Differences in Reported Visual Imagery and Cognitive Performance

1978 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 451-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart J. McKelvie ◽  
Mary M. Rohrberg

Selected on the basis of their scores on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, 16 High Visualizers and 14 Low Visualizers (equally divided by sex) completed various cognitive tasks thought to involve visual (Space Relations, Watch Rotation) and non-visual (Verbal Reasoning, Abstract Reasoning, Numerical Ability) processes. Although Low Visualizers (particularly males) were superior to High Visualizers in Numerical Ability, both groups performed equally well on the other tests. Since correlational analyses indicated that scores on the vividness questionnaire and the Gordon Controllability of Imagery Questionnaire were not independent, particularly for females, it was suggested that questionnaires ought to be developed better to differentiate the abilities to generate and control visual images.

1980 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores J. Miller ◽  
Gail Spiridigliozzi ◽  
Ellen B. Ryan ◽  
Mary P. Callan ◽  
Joan E. Mclaughlin

Relationships between measures of visual habituation and performance on cognitive tasks at 51 months of age and between these and previous assessments (at 39, 27, 15 months and early infancy) were examined in 24 children. Results suggest that youngsters currently characterized as faster habituators, in terms of first fixation data, may be somewhat advanced cognitively compared to slower habituators. The indexing of a group of fast and of slow habituators, through median split of ranked first fixation ratios, proved effective in predicting performance across the four cognitive tasks at 51 months according to a discriminant analysis. Correlations between these ratios and both current and previous cognitive scores showed some stability of individual differences from 15 through 51 months.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander P. Burgoyne ◽  
Jason S. Tsukahara ◽  
Christopher Draheim ◽  
Randall W Engle

Why do some individuals learn more quickly than others, or perform better in complex cognitive tasks? In this article, we describe how differential and experimental research methods can be used to study intelligence in humans and non-human animals. More than one hundred years ago, Spearman (1904) discovered a general factor underpinning performance across cognitive domains in humans. Shortly thereafter, Thorndike (1935) discovered positive correlations between cognitive performance measures in the albino rat. Today, research continues to shed light on the underpinnings of the positive manifold observed among ability measures. In this review, we focus on the relationship between cognitive performance and attention control: the domain-general ability to maintain focus on task-relevant information while preventing attentional capture by task-irrelevant thoughts and events. Recent work from our lab has revealed that individual differences in attention control can largely explain the positive associations between broad cognitive abilities such as working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. In research on mice, attention control has been closely linked to a general ability factor reflecting route learning and problem solving. Taken together, both lines of research suggest that individual differences in attention control underpin performance in a variety of complex cognitive tasks, helping to explain why measures of cognitive ability correlate positively. Efforts to find confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence across species stands to improve not only our understanding of attention control, but cognition in general.


1997 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 881-882 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Antonietti ◽  
Debora Bologna ◽  
Giovanna Lupi

50 undergraduates were tested on a mental synthesis task aimed at producing creative visual patterns and were administered three questionnaires measuring imagery vividness and control. Analysis did not support a relationship between scores on visual synthesis and imagery and showed that neither kind of score was influenced by sex and studies attended.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wlodzislaw Duch

Lack of vivid sensory imagery has recently become an active subject of research, under the name of aphantasia. Extremely vivid imagery, or hyperphantasia, is at the other end of the spectrum of individual differences. While most research has focused on visual imagery in this paper I argue that from a neuropsychological perspective this phenomenon is much more widespread, and should be categorized as imagery sensory agnosia. After over twenty years of learning to play music phenomenology of auditory imagery agnosia is described from the first-person perspective. Reflections on other forms of imagery agnosia and deficits of autobiographical memories are presented and a hypothesis about putative brain processes that can account for such phenomena is discussed. Extreme individual differences in imagery and in autobiographical memory have implications for many fields of study, from consciousness research to education.


2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rodway ◽  
Karen Gillies ◽  
Astrid Schepman

This study examined whether individual differences in the vividness of visual imagery influenced performance on a novel long-term change detection task. Participants were presented with a sequence of pictures, with each picture and its title displayed for 17  s, and then presented with changed or unchanged versions of those pictures and asked to detect whether the picture had been changed. Cuing the retrieval of the picture's image, by presenting the picture's title before the arrival of the changed picture, facilitated change detection accuracy. This suggests that the retrieval of the picture's representation immunizes it against overwriting by the arrival of the changed picture. The high and low vividness participants did not differ in overall levels of change detection accuracy. However, in replication of Gur and Hilgard (1975) , high vividness participants were significantly more accurate at detecting salient changes to pictures compared to low vividness participants. The results suggest that vivid images are not characterised by a high level of detail and that vivid imagery enhances memory for the salient aspects of a scene but not all of the details of a scene. Possible causes of this difference, and how they may lead to an understanding of individual differences in change detection, are considered.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Potts ◽  
Robin Law ◽  
John F. Golding ◽  
David Groome

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) refers to the finding that the retrieval of an item from memory impairs the retrieval of related items. The extent to which this impairment is found in laboratory tests varies between individuals, and recent studies have reported an association between individual differences in the strength of the RIF effect and other cognitive and clinical factors. The present study investigated the reliability of these individual differences in the RIF effect. A RIF task was administered to the same individuals on two occasions (sessions T1 and T2), one week apart. For Experiments 1 and 2 the final retrieval test at each session made use of a category-cue procedure, whereas Experiment 3 employed category-plus-letter cues, and Experiment 4 used a recognition test. In Experiment 2 the same test items that were studied, practiced, and tested at T1 were also studied, practiced, and tested at T2, but for the remaining three experiments two different item sets were used at T1 and T2. A significant RIF effect was found in all four experiments. A significant correlation was found between RIF scores at T1 and T2 in Experiment 2, but for the other three experiments the correlations between RIF scores at T1 and T2 failed to reach significance. This study therefore failed to find clear evidence for reliable individual differences in RIF performance, except where the same test materials were used for both test sessions. These findings have important implications for studies involving individual differences in RIF performance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Eduardo Rosa ◽  
Ola Eiken ◽  
Mikael Grönkvist ◽  
Roger Kölegård ◽  
Nicklas Dahlström ◽  
...  

Abstract. Fighter pilots may be exposed to extended flight missions. Consequently, there is increasing concern about fatigue. We investigated the effects of fatigue and cognitive performance in a simulated 11-hr mission in the 39 Gripen fighter aircraft. Five cognitive tasks were used to assess cognitive performance. Fatigue was measured with the Samn–Perelli Fatigue Index. Results showed that performance in the non-executive task degraded after approximately 7 hr. Fatigue ratings showed a matching trend to the performance in this task. Performance in tasks taxing executive functions did not decline. We interpreted that fatigue can be overridden by increased attentional effort for executive tasks but not for non-executive components of cognition. Participants underestimated their performance and metacognitive accuracy was not influenced by fatigue.


1979 ◽  
Vol 42 (04) ◽  
pp. 1073-1114 ◽  

SummaryIn collaborative experiments in 199 laboratories, nine commercial thromboplastins, four thromboplastins held by the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBS & C), London and the British Comparative Thromboplastin were tested on fresh normal and coumarin plasmas, and on three series of freeze-dried plasmas. One of these was made from coumarin plasmas and the other two were prepared from normal plasmas; in each series, one plasma was normal and the other two represented different degrees of coumarin defect.Each thromboplastin was calibrated against NIBS&C rabbit brain 70/178, from the slope of the line joining the origin to the point of intersection of the mean ratios of coumarin/normal prothrombin times when the ratios obtained with the two thromboplastins on the same fresh plasmas were plotted against each other. From previous evidence, the slopes were calculated which would have been obtained against the NIBS&C “research standard” thromboplastin 67/40, and termed the “calibration constant” of each thromboplastin. Values obtained from the freeze-dried coumarin plasmas gave generally similar results to those from fresh plasmas for all thromboplastins, whereas values from the artificial plasmas agreed with those from fresh plasmas only when similar thromboplastins were being compared.Taking into account the slopes of the calibration lines and the variation between laboratories, precision in obtaining a patient’s prothrombin time was similar for all thromboplastins.


TAPPI Journal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (05) ◽  
pp. 295-305
Author(s):  
Wesley Gilbert ◽  
Ivan Trush ◽  
Bruce Allison ◽  
Randy Reimer ◽  
Howard Mason

Normal practice in continuous digester operation is to set the production rate through the chip meter speed. This speed is seldom, if ever, adjusted except to change production, and most of the other digester inputs are ratioed to it. The inherent assumption is that constant chip meter speed equates to constant dry mass flow of chips. This is seldom, if ever, true. As a result, the actual production rate, effective alkali (EA)-to-wood and liquor-to-wood ratios may vary substantially from assumed values. This increases process variability and decreases profits. In this report, a new continuous digester production rate control strategy is developed that addresses this shortcoming. A new noncontacting near infrared–based chip moisture sensor is combined with the existing weightometer signal to estimate the actual dry chip mass feedrate entering the digester. The estimated feedrate is then used to implement a novel feedback control strategy that adjusts the chip meter speed to maintain the dry chip feedrate at the target value. The report details the results of applying the new measurements and control strategy to a dual vessel continuous digester.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Feldman

This paper is a contribution to the growing literature on the role of projective identification in understanding couples' dynamics. Projective identification as a defence is well suited to couples, as intimate partners provide an ideal location to deposit unwanted parts of the self. This paper illustrates how projective identification functions differently depending on the psychological health of the couple. It elucidates how healthier couples use projective identification more as a form of communication, whereas disturbed couples are inclined to employ it to invade and control the other, as captured by Meltzer's concept of "intrusive identification". These different uses of projective identification affect couples' capacities to provide what Bion called "containment". In disturbed couples, partners serve as what Meltzer termed "claustrums" whereby projections are not contained, but imprisoned or entombed in the other. Applying the concept of claustrum helps illuminate common feelings these couples express, such as feeling suffocated, stifled, trapped, held hostage, or feeling as if the relationship is killing them. Finally, this paper presents treatment challenges in working with more disturbed couples.


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