The Influence Of Visual Angle Of Stimulus On The Short-maintenance Of Visual Images, Mental Scanning And Mental Rotation

Mental imagery occurred when perceptual information was accessed from memory, giving rise to the experience of "seeing with the mind's eye," "hearing with the mind's ear," and so on. It was the part and parcel of visuo-spatial cognitive ability, just as most language cognition took proposition or conception as its representation, most spatial cognition took image as its representation. Visual image was not only one type of image that people used most in daily life, but also one type of image that was studied most in cognitive psychology. However, most researches of visual image focused on memory-based image rather than on the attention-based image. Memory-based images came from the experience stored in LTM, so they were scarcely influenced by physical properties of the object, while attention-based images came from information stored in STM, they held a close connection with retina graphic. Few present research made a difference between them, so not to mention to pay attention to whether the physical properties of the object that give rise to attention-based image affect the maintenance, scanning and rotation of attention-based image. The most authoritative theory in the domain of imagery, only emphasized that the objects in image also contained the properties of size, orientation and locus, which could affect the further operation of images, but not manifested whether the visual property of the external object that as a basic source of the attention-based image, could affect the processing of image.Our experimental research was composed of three parts including five experiments, all of which were aimed to explore whether and how the visual properties, as a pre-imaging factors, affected the processing of image, such as maintaining, scanning and rotating of image. The first three experiments were conducted to examine whether there was an influence on processing of image, the forth experiment investigated how visual angle affected mental scanning by regression analysis, and the last experiment inspected whether there was an interaction effect on mental rotation between visual angle and task difficulty. The first experiment was arranged as a mixed design, and the others were arranged as a Within-subject design.