Rademaker Rosanne L, Pearson Joel
Cognitive Neuroscience Department, Maastricht University Maastricht, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2012 Jul 10;3:224. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00224. eCollection 2012.
Visual imagery has been closely linked to brain mechanisms involved in perception. Can visual imagery, like visual perception, improve by means of training? Previous research has demonstrated that people can reliably evaluate the vividness of single episodes of imagination - might the metacognition of imagery also improve over the course of training? We had participants imagine colored Gabor patterns for an hour a day, over the course of five consecutive days, and again 2 weeks after training. Participants rated the subjective vividness and effort of their mental imagery on each trial. The influence of imagery on subsequent binocular rivalry dominance was taken as our measure of imagery strength. We found no overall effect of training on imagery strength. Training did, however, improve participant's metacognition of imagery. Trial-by-trial ratings of vividness gained predictive power on subsequent rivalry dominance as a function of training. These data suggest that, while imagery strength might be immune to training in the current context, people's metacognitive understanding of mental imagery can improve with practice.
视觉表象与感知所涉及的大脑机制密切相关。视觉表象能否像视觉感知一样通过训练得到改善？先前的研究表明，人们能够可靠地评估单次想象情节的生动程度——表象的元认知在训练过程中是否也会得到改善？我们让参与者连续五天每天花一小时想象彩色的加博尔图案，并在训练后两周再次进行想象。参与者在每次试验中对其心理表象的主观生动程度和努力程度进行评分。我们将表象对随后双眼竞争优势的影响作为表象强度的衡量指标。我们发现训练对表象强度没有总体影响。然而，训练确实提高了参与者对表象的元认知。随着训练的进行，逐次试验的生动程度评分对随后的竞争优势获得了预测能力。这些数据表明，虽然在当前情境下表象强度可能不受训练影响，但人们对心理表象的元认知理解可以通过练习得到改善。
