Mental rotation
Mental rotation is another classic cognitive psychology paradigm, which was devised by Roger Shepard at Stanford. To understand how this task works, take a look at the shapes in the top panel (A) of Figure 12.3. The two shapes are the same; the one on the right has been rotated clockwise by about 90°. By contrast, the pair of shapes on the bottom row (B) do not match. If you look carefully, you will notice that they are mirror-
Earworms and Imagery 5 images of each other, so that even if you rotate the shape on the left clockwise by 90°, it won’t match up with the shape on the right. In the mental rotation task, subjects are pre- sented with pairs of 2-D or 3-D shapes, and asked whether they are mirrored or non- mirrored.
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Instead of a map of an island that subjects had to hold “in their mind’s eye”, Halpern had subjects imagine a tune “in their mind’s ear.” She used familiar songs for which almost everyone knows the melody and lyrics. For example, the first line of The Star Spangled Banner is “Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light.” The task is to compare the pitch of different notes in the song, which we can conveniently refer to using the lyrics. Is the first note (“Oh”) higher or lower than the third note (“can”)? You’re not allowed to sing or hum the tune — you have to imagine it in your head. Most people find this to be a hard task. It’s even more difficult when the notes are spaced further apart in time, for example when comparing “Oh” with “Dawn’s.” Halpern found that reaction time in this task was directly proportional to the separation in time between the notes (Figure 12.7). Using the same logic as the mental imagery tasks, the claim is that this shows that mu- sical imagery uses a mental representation that has extension in time, just like actual music does. Just like a mental image has properties of distance and spatial relation- ships, the idea here is that the mental representation of a tune in your head has the property of existing in time, and the property of having temporal relationships (notes can be nearer or further apart in time). Put another way, you can’t randomly access any …show more content…
The strongest hypothesis would be that the brain areas involved are identical for imagery and perception, but this is almost certainly not the case. Despite how vividly detailed music in your head can be, you can tell the difference between music in your head and actual music. The only cas- es where people can’t tell the difference are musical hallucinations, which are the sub- ject of Chapter 15. How much overlap is there in the brain areas involved? The two broad approaches in the cognitive neuroscience tool kit are lesion studies and brain
Earworms and Imagery 7 imaging. Both of these approaches have been brought to bear on the brain mechanisms underlying musical imagery, and we’ll address each approach in turn.
Lesion studies of musical
People who cannot sing are missing a structure that enables a response to inform the motor system and person that he/ she is singing off tune. Gottlieb proposes a research method, involving how music making engages and modifies the brain. As Gottlieb understood, music making can be used as a therapeutic tool to improve neurological impairments and
Levine states that children have two ways in which they organize the information they receive from the world around them. He refers to these methods as sequential ordering and spatial ordering. He defines spatial patterns as, “assembled parts that occupy space and settle on the doorsteps of our minds all at once” (Levine, p.151). Many examples are given of when spatial ordering is prevalent, for instance, when a student draws a map or recognizes the features of a person’s face. Levine defines sequential patterns as information gaining “admission to the minds one bit at a time and in an order that’s meant not to be missed” (Levine, p.151). He says that sequential ordering is used when students try to master a science project or learn a telephone number. Neurologically, Levine states that sequential ordering is carried out on the left side of the brain and spatial ordering is carried out on the right side of the brain. He also makes references to the possibility of childr...
Music and the Brain: Processing and Responding (A General Overview). For any individual who either avidly listens to or performs music, it is understood that many melodies have amazing effects on both our emotions and our perception. To address the effects of music on the brain, it seems most logical to initially map the auditory and neural pathways of sound. In the case of humans, the mechanism responsible for receiving and transmitting sound to the brain is the ears.
The widely popular research on mirror neurons and various applications of the research findings began with an important, but unexpected finding in the brains of macaque monkeys. The original studies did not intend to look at mirror neurons and in fact the existence of mirror neurons was found by accident. Neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues found a group of cells that fired whenever a monkey prepared to act on a stimulus as well as when it watched another monkey act on the stimulus (Winerman, 2005). For example, the monkeys showed a similar pattern of activation when they were performing a simple motor action like grasping a peanut and when they watched another monkey perform the same action (Winerman, 2005). In other words, monkey see, monkey fire -- monkey do, monkey fire. This grouping of cells was called "mirror neurons." The ...
Wohlschlager & Wohlschlager (1998) based their ideas for this study on a theory, most impressively demonstrated by Cooper (1976), stating that the resemblance of mental rotation to external physical rotation, calls for a mental process that mimics external physical rotation. However, it is pointed out that there is a principal difference between motion perception and mental rotation. Whereas motion perception is a rather automatic process, mental rotation is strategic and shares some characteristics with voluntary actions (Wohlschlager & Wohlschlager, 1998).
Music has been referred to as a universal language for the world. No matter where in the world one is, people can come together and appreciate a piece of music. This is because melody and rhythm have no language barrier. That is why we see musical acts sell out shows across the globe, not just within their home countries. People have favorite types of music for many reasons, but particularly as Sacks says “We turn to music, we need it, because of its ability to move us, to induce feelings and moods, states of mind. “(Sacks, “The Power of Music”) But how often do people examine what actually happens to the brain once music is heard? There are fascinating things that can occur within the brain when one puts on a piece of music. Certain types of music have a positive effect in the brain that concern anger,
Scientist has proven that humans have responded to music ever since birth. Elena Mannes, a brain scientist, has recorded the relationship with music throughout a human’s lifetime. Mannes even went far enough to say that the cries of babies just a few weeks old were discovered to have some intervals common to western music. She also states that scientists believe music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other human function. With this knowledge, she sees that music has so much potential when it comes to affecting the brain and how it works.One main area of the brain music can have a real effect on is neurological deficits (Mannes INT). For example, if a patient who just had a stroke occur and lost verbal functions, those functions can be stimulated by music. This is known as melodic intonation therapy and it could help patients regain speech. The human brain is split into two parts, the left and right hemisphere. The right hemisphere has been traditionally thought of to be the “seat of music appreciation.” However, the right side has not been proven for that role in any way (Joelving INT).
Sternberg, R. J. (1999). Cognitive psychology (2nd ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers
The brain is a very powerful organ, no doubt. It tells your body how to react and what to do. But what happens when you listen to music? How does your brain react? Let’s take a look.
Aziz-Zadeh, L., Liew, S.-L., & Dandekar, F. (2013). Exploring the neural correlates of visual creativity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(4), 475–480. doi:10.1093/scan/nss021
When we listen to music a number of things occur: we process sound through the auditory complex, an artist’s movement through the visual cortex, dancing and other rhythmical movement through the cerebellum. The Motor Cortex also enables movement such as foot tapping or hand clapping. Our Hippocampus stores our experiences through music and enables musicians to remember musical pieces. Finally, the Amygdala allows for emotional reactions to music. Because music is a combination of our different senses, we as individuals can process things differently and naturally we will like some genres more than others. Music is one of th...
Scientists and skeptics have different beliefs about the benefits of the Mozart Effect. Scientists found that Mozart “enhanced synchrony between the neural activity in the right frontal and left tempoparietal cortical areas of the brain,” and that this effect continued for “over 12 minutes” (Rauscher & Shaw, 1998, p. 839). Based on these results, Leng and Shaw speculated that “listening to Mozart could be stimulating the neural firing patterns in the parts of the cerebral cortex responsible for spatial-temporal skills, which subsequently enhances the spatial-temporal abilities that are housed in those parts of the cortex”[Dowd]. However nonbelievers suggest that the research is incomplete and misleading. The Irvine study that launched the phenomenon has been widely criticized. The Startling results announced by the initial paper were misleading. First, the researchers claimed that the undergraduates improved on all three spatial-reasoning tests. But as Shaw later clarified, the only enhancement came from one task—paper folding and cutting. Further, the researchers presented the data in the form...
The authors of this journal article were interested in the relationship between musical ability and cognitive processing as well as the event related potentials of both auditory and visual processing in the brain. To accomplish this, they did a study of 20 subjects, 10 who were musicians, and the other 10 were non-musicians. The results proved them right in the aspect that there is a correlation between musical ability and audio and visual event related potentials. This article will be useful to s...
Weiner, I. Healy, A. Freedheim, D. Proctor,R.W., Schinka,J.A. (2003) Handbook of Psychology: Experimental psychology,18, pp 500
Cooper, Belle. " How Music Affects and Benefits Your Brain."lifehacker.come. N.p., 11 22 2013. Web. 3