Roger Shepard Quotes (10 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Famous Roger Shepard Quotes

“We generalize from one situation to another not because we cannot tell the difference between the two situations but because we judge that they are likely to belong to a set of situations having the same consequence.”

Roger Shepard

Source: "Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science," 1987, p. 1322

“The system of constraints that governs the projections and transformations of… bodies in space must long ago have become internalized as a powerful, though largely unconscious, part of our perceptual machinery.”

Roger Shepard

R.N. Shepard (1978). "The mental image." American Psychologist 33, 125-137. Shepard, 1978, p. 136.

“A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them. To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (i) decays exponentially with this distance, and (ii) does so in accordance with one of two metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along which the stimuli vary. These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms.”

Roger Shepard

Source: "Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science," 1987, p. 1317

“The subject detects the presence and interrelationships of the basic components of one of the two-dimensional drawings - particularly, the variously oriented straight lines, the several types of vertices by which they are connected and, presumably, something of the structural relationships among these components within the two-dimensional pattern. Then, on the basis of some higher-level processing of these extracted features and their interrelationships, an internal representation, code, or verbal description is generated for each picture separately that captures the intrinsic structure of the three-dimensional object in a form that is independent of the particular orientation in which that object happens to be displayed.”

Roger Shepard

Source: Mental images and their transformations. 1982, p. 64; as cited in: Keith K. Niall, "‘Mental rotation’, pictured rotation, and tandem rotation in depth." Acta psychologica 95.1 (1997): 31-83.

“It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world.”

Roger Shepard

L.A. Cooper and R.N. Shepard (1984). "Turning something over in the mind." Scientific American 251(6), 106-114; p. 114.
Context: In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues.