Sheldon Signy, Amaral Robert, Levine Brian
a Department of Psychology , McGill University , Montreal , Canada.
b Integrated Program in Neuroscience , McGill University , Montreal , Canada.
Memory. 2017 Mar;25(3):360-369. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2016.1178777. Epub 2016 May 5.
Individuals differ in how they mentally imagine past events. When reminiscing about a past experience, some individuals remember the event accompanied by rich visual images, while others will remember it with few of these images. In spite of the implications that these differences in the use of imagery have to the understanding of human memory, few studies have taken them into consideration. We examined how imagery interference affecting event memory retrieval was differently modulated by spatial and object imagery ability. We presented participants with a series of video-clips depicting complex events. Participants subsequently answered true/false questions related to event, spatial, or feature details contained in the videos, while simultaneously viewing stimuli that interfered with visual imagery processes (dynamic visual noise; DVN) or a control grey screen. The impact of DVN on memory accuracy was related to individual differences in spatial imagery ability. Individuals high in spatial imagery were less accurate at recalling details from the videos when simultaneously viewing the DVN stimuli compared to those low in spatial imagery ability. This finding held for questions related to the event and spatial details but not feature details. This study advocates for the inclusion of individual differences when studying memory processes.
个体在对过去事件进行心理想象的方式上存在差异。在回忆过去的经历时，有些人会伴随着丰富的视觉图像来回忆事件，而另一些人则很少有这些图像。尽管这些意象使用上的差异对理解人类记忆有诸多影响，但很少有研究考虑到它们。我们研究了空间意象能力和物体意象能力如何不同地调节意象干扰对事件记忆检索的影响。我们向参与者展示了一系列描绘复杂事件的视频片段。参与者随后回答与视频中包含的事件、空间或特征细节相关的是非问题，同时观看干扰视觉意象过程的刺激物（动态视觉噪声；DVN）或一个对照灰色屏幕。DVN对记忆准确性的影响与空间意象能力的个体差异有关。与空间意象能力低的个体相比，空间意象能力高的个体在同时观看DVN刺激物时，回忆视频细节的准确性较低。这一发现适用于与事件和空间细节相关的问题，但不适用于特征细节。这项研究主张在研究记忆过程时纳入个体差异。
