Watch and learn! Carefully selected media links will help bring key concepts and theories to life, preparing you for your studies and exams. 

Click on the following links which will open in a new window.

Video Links

• How We Dress In Our Minds - An Eye Tracking Study
  A description of an eye tracking study involving mental rotation with a fashion stimulus, a task of mentally “sewing together” a series of sewing patterns.

• Neuronal Microcircuits Underlying Spatial Cognition
  A discussion of the neural processes that are active in spatial tasks. High level, but a nice exposure to cellular recording of single cell activity.

• Visual Mnemonics Vocabulary Strategy
  A mnemonic device that uses visual imagery in order to build vocabulary. A nice practical application of visual memory research.

Audio Links

• Video Games Boost Brain Power, Multitasking Skills.
  This Morning Edition piece explores how video games may improve cognitive skills such as spatial cognition.

• Growing a Bigger Brain is a Walk in the Park
  Task of the Nation features two researchers who discuss how walking may promote brain growth in the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with spatial memory.

• Aerobic Exercise May Improve Memory in Seniors
  Another story about the possible beneficial effects of exercise on spatial memory, this time from Morning Edition.

Web Resources

• Mental Rotation for the Blind
  "Mental rotation" for blind people? Yes! This site allows you to listen to "soundscapes" of Shepard-Metzler objects used in imagery research with the blind. Fascinating!
  Follow-up exercise: Discuss whether procedures might be developed to study “auditory images” in the deaf.

• Visual imagery and consciousness
  This page focuses on the role of imagery in consciousness, and also presents some history of visual imagery theories.
  Follow-up exercise: Discuss the role that visual images play in the daydreams of students. Do students vary in the amount of imagery that they use while daydreaming? (Another preview of Chapter 13 on individual differences!)

• Mental Rotation
  Another online mental rotation experiment, this one a part of the Hanover College series, that allows students to set the stimulus type, number of rotation angles, and other parameters.