November 30, 2010
Imagine That
The human mind has no limits and our imagination can really stretch very far. The work of Jila Zakizadeh and her supervisor, neuroscience professor Amedeo D’Angiulli is a great illustration of that.
“When remembering specific everyday objects or events linked to past experiences, for example personal events such as the face of a relative or a graduation day,” says D’Angiulli, “people generally report ‘seeing with the mind’s eye.’ A pervasive aspect of people’s report is the vividness of their mental images. Images may come from the imagination – for example, a pink dog – or from retrieved episodic and specific representations which refer to everyday objects – for example, your breakfast this morning.”
Zakizadeh and D’Angiulli are focusing on how people use visual mental images or visualization to reason about objects in relative spatially and perceptually complex positions. The perceived scenarios considered include occlusion, concealment or distance of one object from another, and situations that may degrade maintenance and manipulation of information in working (or temporary) memory.
“We are collecting data by asking people to imagine objects from verbal descriptions and then we measure the time that they take to generate images,” says Zakizadeh. “We also take electroencephalograms of brain activity, and ask participants to tell us how vivid their images are. So far, we have done a few preliminary data analyses, and looked at about 40 subjects. We also have results from about 500 subjects from Dr. D’Angiulli’s previous studies.”
“A pervasive aspect of people’s report is the vividness of their mental images”
The knowledge acquired through this research may be applied to enhancing reasoning in medical decision-making, the work of surgeons in medical procedures, robotic application and technological thinking.
Zakizadeh and D’Angiulli greatly enjoy working together.
“Dr. D’Angiulli has very brilliant ideas and a lot of knowledge,” says Zakizadeh.
“Jila has an engineering background and I have a psychology and neuroscience background,” adds Dr. D’Angiulli. “So it’s a really good reciprocal collaboration.”
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