Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, United States.
Cognition. 2023 Sep;238:105498. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105498. Epub 2023 May 18.
We examine non-commitment in the imagination. Across 5 studies (N > 1, 800), we find that most people are non-committal about basic aspects of their mental images, including features that would be readily apparent in real images. While previous work on the imagination has discussed the possibility of non-commitment, this paper is the first, to our knowledge, to examine this systematically and empirically. We find that people do not commit to basic properties of specified mental scenes (Studies 1 and 2), and that people report non-commitment rather than uncertainty or forgetfulness (Study 3). Such non-commitment is present even for people with generally vivid imaginations, and those who report imagining the specified scene very vividly (Studies 4a, 4b). People readily confabulate properties of their mental images when non-commitment is not offered as an explicit option (Study 5). Taken together, these results establish non-commitment as a pervasive component of mental imagery.
我们研究想象中的非承诺现象。通过 5 项研究（N>1800），我们发现大多数人对其心理意象的基本方面都不做出承诺，包括在真实图像中会很容易显现的特征。虽然之前有关想象的研究已经讨论了非承诺的可能性，但本文首次系统地和实证地检验了这一点。我们发现，人们不会对特定心理场景的基本属性做出承诺（研究 1 和 2），并且人们报告的是非承诺，而不是不确定性或遗忘（研究 3）。即使对于想象力通常较为生动的人，以及那些报告非常生动地想象出特定场景的人（研究 4a、4b），这种非承诺也存在。当非承诺不作为明确选项提供时，人们会轻易地编造他们心理意象的属性（研究 5）。总之，这些结果表明非承诺是心理意象的一个普遍组成部分。
