Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing: Behavioral ... - Arteimi.info

neuro-physiological similarity? An answer to this was given by Farah [12] in
1988, which earned her the Troland award in experimental psychology.
Goldenbarg and his colleagues [9] noted through a series of experiments that
there exists a correlation between accessing of mental imagery and increased
blood flow in the visual cortex. For example, when people make judgements
with visual information, the blood flow in the visual cortex increases.
2.4.8 Cognitive Maps of Mental Imagery
Cognitive maps are the internal representation of real world spatial information.
Their exact form of representation is not clearly known to date. However, most
psychologists believe that such maps include both propositional codes as well
as imagery for internal representation. For example, to encode the structural
map of a city, one stores the important places by their imagery and the
relationship among these by some logical codes. The relationship in the
present context refers to the distance between two places or their directional
relevance, such as place A is north to place B and at a distance of ½ Km.
How exactly people represent distance in their cognitive map is yet a
mystery. McNamara and his colleagues [22] made several experiments to
understand the process of encoding distance in the cognitive maps. They
observed that after the process of encoding the road maps of cities is over,
people can quickly remember the cities closely connected by roads to a city
under consideration. But the cities far away by mileage from a given city do
not appear quickly in our brain. This implicates that there must be some
mechanisms to store the relative distances between elements in a cognitive
map.
Besides representing distance and geographical relationship among
objects, the cognitive maps also encode shapes of the pathways connecting
the objects. For example, if the road includes curvilinear paths with large
straight line segments, vide fig. 2.9, the same could be stored in our cognitive
map easily [7]. However, experimental evidences show that people cannot
easily remember complex curvilinear road trajectories (fig. 2.10). Recently, Moar
and Bower [23] studied the encoding of angle formation by two non-collinear
road trajectories. They observed experimentally that people have a general
tendency to approximate near right angles as right angles in their cognitive
map. For example, three streets that form a triangle in reality may not appear so
in the cognitive map. This is due to the fact that the sum of the internal angles
of a triangle in any physical system is 180 degrees; however, with the angles
close to 90 degrees being set exactly to 90 degrees in the cognitive map, the