Raenisha Williams
11/30/2014
Psych 256
Cog Blog Post: #3
Imagery and Perception
When I was 7 months pregnant my mother brought me my very first car. She brought my car because she knew I was scared to drive, which lead me to not want to buy it myself. Since I was coming home from state college, I needed a car to get around in the city. During the summer break, I drove that car as much as I could around my neighborhood. The only thing about my driving was that my perception was off. I could see what I was doing, but I could perceive how close I was from another car.
During one of my many parking sessions on a small row home on a Philadelphia Street, I got upset because I couldn’t park. Not only was have I been parking for 10 minutes, but there were 2 cars behind me. My sister told me to just drive around the block and start over. My parking isn’t that bad, but the way my car is made, I have a tinted back window and sport’s car like bar (I have no idea what it’s called) on my trunk that prevented me from seeing fully.
When I pulled off to drive down the street I noticed all the cars lined up on the block, but I didn’t notice the last car at the end of the block was parked closer to the street than the other cars. Riding down the street a little annoyed, I got to the end of the block and all I heard a loud “BANG” on the right side of my car. I went around the block and stopped at my house. When I got out my car to check the damages, I noticed my side mirror was hanging off my car. The imagery in my mind made my perception off by a couple of meters.
My story relates to Lesson 12 Visual Imagery on Imagery and Perception. In E. Bruce Goldstein book Cognitive Psychology chapter 10, he had an example of an experiment by Kosslyn where they looked at car far away and tried to see the details, then looked at the car closer to perceive the details more. The point of the experiment was to, “look at how imagery is affected by the size of an object in a person’s visual field with the observation about the perception in the mind.” Being a far distance away from the car I thought it was lined up and close to the pavement like the others. The imagery of the car being far away and lined up like the rest, affected my perception of how close I was.
Work cited
Goldstein, E B. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. 3rd. ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.