School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, UK.
Conscious Cogn. 2013 Mar;22(1):148-54. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.004. Epub 2012 Dec 29.
To what extent are visual fantasies constrained by our perceptual experience of the real world? Our study exploits the fact that people's knowledge of the appearance of individuals from the early 20th Century (e.g., Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill) derives predominantly from viewing black-and-white media images. An initial experiment shows that mental imagery for individuals from this period are experienced as significantly less colourful than imagery for individuals from the era of colour media. A second experiment manipulated whether participants were instructed to explicitly imagine using colour or not (i.e., "imagine Albert Einstein wearing a green jacket" vs. "imagine Albert Einstein wearing a jacket"). Results show that colour manipulation only influences imagery for black-and-white era individuals, with no comparable effect on imagery for colour era individuals. This finding is replicated in a third experiment that includes an additional control condition of imagining generic characters (i.e., "Imagine a knight wearing a cloak" vs. "imagine a knight wearing a red cloak"). Again, only imagery for black-and-white era individuals is affected by the colour manipulation. Overall these results provide evidence for long-term perceptual specificity effects in mental imagery. We argue that visual fantasies can be constrained by surface features of underlying representations in memory, even when imagining something we have never directly perceived.
视觉幻想在多大程度上受到我们对现实世界的感知经验的限制？我们的研究利用了这样一个事实，即人们对 20 世纪早期（如阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦、温斯顿·丘吉尔）个人外貌的了解主要来自于观看黑白媒体图像。一项初步实验表明，这一时期的人的心理意象的色彩明显比色彩媒体时代的人的意象要少。第二项实验则操纵了参与者是否被指示明确地想象使用颜色或不使用颜色（即“想象阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦穿着绿色夹克”与“想象阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦穿着夹克”）。结果表明，颜色操纵只影响黑白时代个体的意象，而对色彩时代个体的意象没有类似的影响。这一发现在第三个实验中得到了复制，该实验包括一个额外的控制条件，即想象一般角色（即“想象一个穿着斗篷的骑士”与“想象一个穿着红色斗篷的骑士”）。同样，只有黑白时代个体的意象受到颜色操纵的影响。总的来说，这些结果为心理意象中的长期感知特异性效应提供了证据。我们认为，即使是在想象我们从未直接感知过的东西时，视觉幻想也可能受到记忆中底层表象的表面特征的限制。
