Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2011 May;22(5):674-81. doi: 10.1177/0956797611404086. Epub 2011 Apr 7.
To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object that disappears from sight, different sources of information can be exploited: memory of its last visible position, its inferred movement through time, and general understanding of the causal structure of the scene. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into unified analog mental representations. In our experiment, participants predicted the position of an object that disappeared behind an occluder and estimated the degree to which the movement was caused by another object. They made considerable errors in predicting imagined displacements. Moreover, their predictions were misaligned with their judgments of causality. They predicted the positions of the invisible moving objects better in events that they judged less causally correct than in events that they judged more causally correct. These results suggest that physical and cognitive parameters of imagined dynamic events do not merge into unitary mental models simulating actual states of the world.
为了在心理上推断出从视线中消失的移动物体的轨迹，可以利用不同的信息来源：对其最后可见位置的记忆、通过时间推断出的运动，以及对场景因果结构的一般理解。通常假设这些线索被整合到统一的模拟心理表征中。在我们的实验中，参与者预测了一个在遮挡物后面消失的物体的位置，并估计了运动是由另一个物体引起的程度。他们在预测想象中的位移时犯了很大的错误。此外，他们的预测与他们对因果关系的判断不一致。他们在判断因果关系更不正确的事件中比在判断因果关系更正确的事件中更好地预测了不可见移动物体的位置。这些结果表明，想象中的动态事件的物理和认知参数不会合并到模拟实际世界状态的单一心理模型中。
