Personality Psychology and Biological Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Bonn, Kaiser-Karl-Ring 9, 53111, Bonn, Germany.
Center for Economics and Neuroscience (CENs), Laboratory of Neurogenetics, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021 Aug;83(6):2486-2497. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02307-z. Epub 2021 Apr 20.
Aphantasia is the condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery. So far, behavioural differences between aphantasics and non-aphantasics have hardly been studied as the base rate of those affected is quite low. The aim of the study was to examine if attentional guidance in aphantasics is impaired by their lack of visual imagery. In two visual search tasks, an already established one by Moriya (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80(5), 1127-1142, 2018) and a newly developed one, we examined whether aphantasics are primed less by their visual imagery than non-aphantasics. The sample in Study 1 consisted of 531 and the sample in Study 2 consisted of 325 age-matched pairs of aphantasics and non-aphantasics. Moriya's Task was not capable of showing the expected effect, whereas the new developed task was. These results could mainly be attributed to different task characteristics. Therefore, a lack of attentional guidance through visual imagery in aphantasics can be assumed and interpreted as new evidence in the imagery debate, showing that mental images actually influence information processing and are not merely epiphenomena of propositional processing.
心像缺失是指自愿产生心像的能力降低或缺失。到目前为止，由于受影响人群的基数很低，心像缺失者和非心像缺失者之间的行为差异几乎没有得到研究。本研究的目的是检验心像缺失是否会因其缺乏视觉心像而影响注意力引导。在两项视觉搜索任务中，我们使用了 Moriya（Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80(5), 1127-1142, 2018）已建立的任务和新开发的任务，以检验心像缺失者是否比非心像缺失者更少受到视觉心像的启动。研究 1 的样本由 531 名参与者组成，研究 2 的样本由 325 对年龄匹配的心像缺失者和非心像缺失者组成。Moriya 的任务未能显示预期的效果，而新开发的任务则显示了预期的效果。这些结果主要归因于不同的任务特征。因此，可以假设心像缺失者的视觉意象引导注意力缺失，并将其解释为意象争论中的新证据，表明心理意象实际上会影响信息处理，而不仅仅是命题处理的副现象。
