Intuitive physics does not rely on visual imagery

This study examined whether individual differences in the vividness of visual imagery influenced performance on a novel long-term change detection task. Participants were presented with a sequence of pictures, with each picture and its title displayed for 17 s, and then presented with changed or unchanged versions of those pictures and asked to detect whether the picture had been changed. Cuing the retrieval of the picture's image, by presenting the picture's title before the arrival of the changed picture, facilitated change detection accuracy. This suggests that the retrieval of the picture's representation immunizes it against overwriting by the arrival of the changed picture. The high and low vividness participants did not differ in overall levels of change detection accuracy. However, in replication of Gur and Hilgard (1975) , high vividness participants were significantly more accurate at detecting salient changes to pictures compared to low vividness participants. The results suggest that vivid images are not characterised by a high level of detail and that vivid imagery enhances memory for the salient aspects of a scene but not all of the details of a scene. Possible causes of this difference, and how they may lead to an understanding of individual differences in change detection, are considered.

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Self-Report Imagery Questionnaire Scores and Subtypes of Social-Desirable Responding

Journal of Individual Differences ◽

10.1027/1614-0001.29.4.181 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 29 (4) ◽

pp. 181-188 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

John Allbutt ◽

Jonathan Ling ◽

Thomas M. Heffernan ◽

Mohammed Shafiullah

Keyword(s):

Visual Imagery ◽

Correlational Analysis ◽

Self Report ◽

Auditory Imagery ◽

Auditory Modality ◽

Visual Thinking ◽

Thinking Style ◽

Social Desirable Responding

Allbutt, Ling, and Shafiullah (2006) and Allbutt, Shafiullah, and Ling (2006) found that scores on self-report measures of visual imagery experience correlate primarily with the egoistic form of social-desirable responding. Here, three studies are reported which investigated whether this pattern of findings generalized to the ratings of imagery vividness in the auditory modality, a new version of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire ( Marks, 1995 ), and reports of visual thinking style. The measure of social-desirable responding used was the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR; Paulhus, 2002 ). Correlational analysis replicated the pattern seen in our earlier work and of the correlations with the egoistic bias, the correlation with vividness of visual imagery was largest and significant, the correlation with visual thinking style next largest and approached significance, and the correlation with vividness of auditory imagery was the smallest and not significant. The size of these correlations mirrored the extent to which the three aspects of imagery were valued by participants.

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