In this study based on ethnographic methods, we investigated how using a three-dimensional (3D) printed liver influenced doctors during liver resection surgery. Results of the analyses implied that using the 3D printed liver enhanced the construction of elaborate mental models of patients’ livers, the mental simulation of liver resections, and the construction of shared mental models of patient...

The intent of this dissertation was to utilize a set of cognitive tasks (that are visuospatial in nature) to investigate how multicomponent mental tasks are accomplished by the brain. Particular attention will be devoted to the processes that involve the generation of mental images and their rotation. The brain is known to approach complex tasks in an organized and planned manner which enables ...

A system-level model of spatial working memory is described, using the author’s computer science and logical modeling approach. The mental image which is remembered is located in a lateral parietal area, and is part of a larger distributed representation including object identities and object appearances. The system is driven by plans which are stored in a separate module corresponding to ventr...

With increasing importance placed on physical appearance in our culture, body image and weight worries may negatively affect the emotional well-being of adolescents. However, researchers disagree as to how an adolescent’s weight, their perception of their weight and their mental health status relate. The purpose of our study was to examine mental distress and social-protective factors in youths...

Mental models are internal representations of world structure, used to accomplish cognitive tasks. I postulate specific representations (of objects and images) and associated context (of world and view) for mental models of line drawings. I then analyze the representations and context to predict specific perceptual modes, including the relative strengths of these modes. The predicted modes are ...

This paper presents one experiment to explain why and under which circumstances visual programming languages would be easier to understand than textual programming languages. Towards this goal we bring together research from psychology of programming and image processing. According to current theories of imagery processing imagery facilitates a quicker access to semantic information. Thus, visu...

OBJECTIVE This study examined the relationship between body image discrepancy (BID) scores for actual versus ideal body image for children and indicators of child mental health. METHODS Data were collected from 650 5th graders and their parents who participated in the Healthy Passages Phase I study. Participants were recruited through schools in Alabama, California, and Texas. Measures includ...

This paper studies the role of imagery in program comprehension. With this goal we investigated whether theories of mental models from Psychology of Programming (e.g., Pennington’s Two Stages Theory) could be expanded to account for the effect of imagery. Given the basic research in image processing, our hypothesis is that imagery would allow a quicker access to the functional (Data Flow) infor...