School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Cognition. 2022 Oct;227:105192. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105192. Epub 2022 Jun 22.
Our capacity to re-experience the past and simulate the future is thought to depend heavily on visual imagery, which allows us to construct complex sensory representations in the absence of sensory stimulation. There are large individual differences in visual imagery ability, but their impact on autobiographical memory and future prospection remains poorly understood. Research in this field assumes the normative use of visual imagery as a cognitive tool to simulate the past and future, however some individuals lack the ability to visualise altogether (a condition termed "aphantasia"). Aphantasia represents a rare and naturally occurring knock-out model for examining the role of visual imagery in episodic memory recall. Here, we assessed individuals with aphantasia on an adapted form of the Autobiographical Interview, a behavioural measure of the specificity and richness of episodic details underpinning the memory of events. Aphantasic participants generated significantly fewer episodic details than controls for both past and future events. This effect was most pronounced for novel future events, driven by selective reductions in visual detail retrieval, accompanied by comparatively reduced ratings of the phenomenological richness of simulated events, and paralleled by quantitative linguistic markers of reduced perceptual language use in aphantasic participants compared to those with visual imagery. Our findings represent the first systematic evidence (using combined objective and subjective data streams) that aphantasia is associated with a diminished ability to re-experience the past and simulate the future, indicating that visual imagery is an important cognitive tool for the dynamic retrieval and recombination of episodic details during mental simulation.
我们重新体验过去和模拟未来的能力被认为严重依赖于视觉意象，它使我们能够在没有感官刺激的情况下构建复杂的感觉表象。个体之间在视觉意象能力上存在很大差异，但它们对自传体记忆和未来展望的影响仍知之甚少。该领域的研究假设视觉意象是一种模拟过去和未来的规范性认知工具，但有些个体完全没有视觉化的能力（一种称为“无象想”的状态）。无象想代表了一种罕见的、自然发生的阻断模型，可以用来检查视觉意象在情景记忆回忆中的作用。在这里，我们使用自传体访谈的改编形式对无象想个体进行了评估，这是一种情景记忆细节特异性和丰富性的行为测量方法，为事件记忆提供了基础。无象想个体在过去和未来事件中产生的情景细节明显少于对照组。这种效应在新颖的未来事件中最为明显，这是由于视觉细节检索的选择性减少所致，同时模拟事件的现象学丰富度评分也相对较低，与无象想个体与具有视觉意象的个体相比，语言使用的感知语言减少的定量语言标记相平行。我们的发现代表了第一个系统的证据（使用客观和主观数据流的组合），即无象想与重新体验过去和模拟未来的能力下降有关，表明视觉意象是在心理模拟中动态检索和组合情景细节的重要认知工具。
