The School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
PLoS One. 2010 Dec 20;5(12):e15217. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015217.
Mental imagery has been associated with many cognitive functions, both high and low-level. Despite recent scientific advances, the contextual and environmental conditions that most affect the mechanisms of visual imagery remain unclear. It has been previously shown that the greater the level of background luminance the weaker the effect of imagery on subsequent perception. However, in these experiments it was unclear whether the luminance was affecting imagery generation or storage of a memory trace. Here, we report that background luminance can attenuate both mental imagery generation and imagery storage during an unrelated cognitive task. However, imagery generation was more sensitive to the degree of luminance. In addition, we show that these findings were not due to differential dark adaptation. These results suggest that afferent visual signals can interfere with both the formation and priming-memory effects associated with visual imagery. It follows that background luminance may be a valuable tool for investigating imagery and its role in various cognitive and sensory processes.
心理意象与许多认知功能有关，包括高低层次的认知功能。尽管最近取得了科学进展，但最能影响视觉意象机制的上下文和环境条件仍不清楚。先前已经表明，背景亮度越高，意象对后续感知的影响就越弱。然而，在这些实验中，不清楚亮度是否影响意象的产生或记忆痕迹的存储。在这里，我们报告说，在一项不相关的认知任务中，背景亮度会减弱心理意象的产生和存储。然而，意象的产生对亮度的变化更为敏感。此外，我们还表明，这些发现并不是由于暗适应的差异造成的。这些结果表明，传入的视觉信号可以干扰与视觉意象相关的形成和启动记忆效应。因此，背景亮度可能是研究意象及其在各种认知和感觉过程中的作用的有用工具。
