The Generation of Involuntary Mental Imagery in an Ecologically-Valid Task

Abstract

Laboratory tasks (e.g., the flanker task) reveal that incidental stimuli (e.g., distractors) can reliably trigger involuntary conscious imagery. Can such involuntary effects, involving competing representations, arise during dual-task conditions? Another concern about these laboratory tasks is whether such effects arise in highly ecologically-valid conditions. For example, do these effects arise from tasks involving dynamic stimuli (e.g., simulations of semi-automated driving experiences)? The data from our experiment suggest that the answer to our two questions is yes. Subjects were presented with video footage of the kinds of events that one would observe if one were seated in the driver's seat of a semi-automated vehicle. Before being presented with this video footage, subjects had been trained to respond to street signs according to laboratory techniques that cause stimulus-elicited involuntary imagery. After training, in the Respond condition, subjects responded to the signs; in the Suppress condition, subjects were instructed to not respond to the signs in the video footage. Subjects in the Suppress condition reported involuntary imagery on a substantive proportion of the trials. Such involuntary effects arose even under dual-task conditions (while performing the n-back task or psychomotor vigilance task). The present laboratory task has implications for semi-automated driving, because the safe interaction between driver and vehicle requires that the communicative signals from vehicle to driver be effective at activating the appropriate cognitions and behavioral inclinations. In addition, our data from the dual-task conditions provide constraints for theoretical models of cognitive resources.

Mental rotation and schizotypal personality traits: A Bayesian approach

“…Future research could also focus on different working memory processes related to mental representation manipulations in other sensory modalities (e.g., one cannot rotate auditory content, so mental rotation performance does not necessarily represent ability to manipulate verbal mental representations, which should be related to auditory hallucinations) and their relationship with schizotypal personality traits and clinical populations. As an example, the ability to inhibit involuntary verbal imagery (e.g., Velasquez, Gazzaley, Toyoda, Ziegler & Morsella, 2021) could be evaluated.…”

Insuppressible cognitions in the reflexive imagery task: Insights and future directions

“…For example, Walker (2019) found substantive rates of insuppressible subvocalizations (~50% of the 30 trials) even when the stimulus was presented briefly (< 200 ms) or when the stimulus was presented under conditions of perceptual load (the stimulus was encircled by six other line drawings). In another experiment ( Velasquez et al, 2021 ), stimulus-elicited insuppressible imagery was observed even when the visual, eliciting stimuli were presented within a complex, dynamic scene (a movie) and the participant was engaged in secondary tasks that are known to induce cognitive load.…”