Lobmaier Janek S, Mast Fred W
Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Exp Psychol. 2008;55(1):47-53. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169.55.1.47.
The effect of imagery on featural and configural face processing was investigated using blurred and scrambled faces. By means of blurring, featural information is reduced; by scrambling a face into its constituent parts configural information is lost. Twenty-four participants learned ten faces together with the sound of a name. In following matching-to-sample tasks participants had to decide whether an auditory presented name belonged to a visually presented scrambled or blurred face in two experimental conditions. In the imagery condition, the name was presented prior to the visual stimulus and participants were required to imagine the corresponding face as clearly and vividly as possible. In the perception condition name and test face were presented simultaneously, thus no facilitation via mental imagery was possible. Analyses of the hit values showed that in the imagery condition scrambled faces were recognized significantly better than blurred faces whereas there was no such effect for the perception condition. The results suggest that mental imagery activates featural representations more than configural representations.
利用模糊和打乱的面孔，研究了表象对特征性和整体性面孔加工的影响。通过模糊处理，特征信息减少；通过将面孔打乱成其组成部分，整体性信息丢失。24名参与者学习了十张面孔及其对应的名字读音。在随后的样本匹配任务中，参与者必须在两种实验条件下判断一个听觉呈现的名字是否属于一个视觉呈现的打乱或模糊面孔。在表象条件下，名字在视觉刺激之前呈现，参与者被要求尽可能清晰生动地想象出相应的面孔。在知觉条件下，名字和测试面孔同时呈现，因此不可能通过心理表象得到促进。对命中值的分析表明，在表象条件下，打乱的面孔比模糊的面孔识别得明显更好，而知觉条件下则没有这种效应。结果表明，心理表象对特征性表征的激活比对整体性表征的激活更多。
