Welker Ágnes, Pető-Plaszkó Orsolya, Verebélyi Luca, Gombos Ferenc, Winkler István, Kovács Ilona
HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.
Semmelweis University Doctoral School, Budapest, Hungary.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jul 1;15(1):22217. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-05100-2.
Mental simulation-the ability to internally model sensory, conceptual, or future events-may include mental imagery as a component, with considerable individual variability in its vividness and dependence on sensory detail. While self-reports have been widely used to assess imagery, they are subjective and prone to bias. Among more objective methods, imagery priming in binocular rivalry has been employed to investigate the influence of mental imagery on perception, but findings have been ambiguous. Here, we introduce a no-report version of the task, using eye-tracking-based optokinetic nystagmus assessment to provide a more reliable measure of perceptual shifts. In addition to visual imagery priming, we introduce conceptual priming, which does not rely on sensory imagery but engages abstract representations. In visual imagery priming, perceptual modulation correlated with self-reported vividness, and participants with low vividness did not show modulatory effects. However, in conceptual priming, effects were observed across the entire vividness spectrum, demonstrating that both concrete sensory-based and abstract conceptual representations can influence perception. These findings challenge purely sensory accounts of mental imagery. We propose avoiding deficit-based terms such as "aphantasia" and advocate for a neuroaffirmative perspective on mental simulation diversity.
心理模拟——在内心对感觉、概念或未来事件进行建模的能力——可能包括心理意象作为其一个组成部分，其生动程度和对感觉细节的依赖存在相当大的个体差异。虽然自我报告已被广泛用于评估意象，但它们具有主观性且容易产生偏差。在更客观的方法中，双眼竞争中的意象启动已被用于研究心理意象对感知的影响，但结果并不明确。在这里，我们引入了该任务的无报告版本，使用基于眼动追踪的视动性眼震评估来提供更可靠的感知变化测量方法。除了视觉意象启动，我们还引入了概念启动，它不依赖于感觉意象，而是涉及抽象表征。在视觉意象启动中，感知调制与自我报告的生动程度相关，生动程度低的参与者没有表现出调制效应。然而，在概念启动中，在整个生动程度范围内都观察到了效应，这表明基于具体感觉的表征和抽象概念表征都可以影响感知。这些发现挑战了对心理意象的纯粹感觉解释。我们建议避免使用基于缺陷的术语，如“心盲症”，并倡导对心理模拟多样性采取神经肯定的观点。
