Difficulty limits of visual mental imagery
Difficulty limits of visual mental imagery
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105436
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发表时间：
2023-03
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Cristina R. Ceja;S. Franconeri
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Cristina R. Ceja;S. Franconeri
虽然过去的工作主要集中在心理意象的表征形式，以及其操作和神经基质与在线感知的相似性上，但令人惊讶的是，很少有人测试心理意象可以产生的细节水平的界限。为了回答这个问题，我们从视觉短期记忆文献中获得灵感，这是一个相关领域，发现记忆容量受到物品数量、它们是否独一无二以及它们是否以及如何移动的影响。我们分别通过主观（实验1；实验2）和客观（实验2）测量方法——难度等级和变化检测任务——来测试心理意象的容量限制，并发现心理意象的限制与视觉短期记忆的限制相似。在实验1中，当有更多的物品时，当这些物品具有独特的颜色而不是相同的颜色时，当它们缩放或旋转而不是仅仅线性翻译时，参与者主观地认为想象1 - 4种颜色的物品的难度更大。实验2分离了不同颜色道具旋转的主观难度等级，并添加了旋转距离操作（10°到110°），再次发现越多的道具，旋转越远，主观难度越高；客观测量显示，更多的项目会导致性能下降，但旋转度不会。主观和客观结果之间的一致性表明类似的成本，但一些不一致性表明主观报告可能过于乐观，可能是因为它们被对细节的错觉所偏见。
While past work has focused on the representational format of mental imagery, and the similarities of its operation and neural substrate to online perception, surprisingly little has tested the boundaries of the level of detail that mental imagery can generate. To answer this question, we take inspiration from the visual short-term memory literature, a related field which has found that memory capacity is affected by the number of items, whether they are unique, and whether and how they move. We test these factors of set size, color heterogeneity, and transformation in mental imagery through both subjective (Exp 1; Exp 2) and objective (Exp 2) measures – difficulty ratings and a change detection task, respectively – to determine the capacity limits of our mental imagery, and find that limits on mental imagery are similar to those for visual short-term memory. In Experiment 1, participants rated the difficulty of imagining 1–4 colored items as subjectively more difficult when there were more items, when the items had unique colors instead of an identical color, and when they scaled or rotated instead of merely linearly translating. Experiment 2 isolated these subjective difficulty ratings of rotation for uniquely colored items, and added a rotation distance manipulation (10° to 110°), again finding higher subjective difficulty for more items, and for when those items rotated farther; the objective measure showed a decrease in performance for more items, but not for rotational degree. Congruities between the subjective and objective results suggest similar costs, but some incongruities suggest that subjective reports can be overly optimistic, likely because they are biased by an illusion of detail.