Work

Involuntary mental imagery is influenced by visual salience

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The attention bottleneck theory suggests that object recognition is limited to one item at a time. A default attentional set may guide attention to unique items when no specific goal is present. The Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT) examines involuntary mental imagery by asking participants not to think of the name of a centrally presented object. Surprisingly, mental imagery occurs on many trials. This study investigates whether similar effects happen when multiple objects appear near the periphery of vision. RIT effects were observed for these objects, with the names of salient singletons reported more often. Imagery is reported more for objects with a heterogeneous feature than homogeneous ones. However, a unique object defined by two features did not yield the same effect. When the task is to ignore all objects, salient objects are more likely to receive initial cognitive processing. These findings contribute to understanding involuntary mental imagery and attentional capture.

Source: Acta Psychologica

DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.105269

Authors: Alexander J. Cook, Dennis Lambert, Mark W. Geisler, Ezequiel Morsella

Institutions: University of British Columbia, San Francisco State University, University of California, San Francisco

Language: English

Topic: Visual Attention and Saliency Detection

Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,670

OpenAlex ID: W4412363739

FWCI:

Cites: 41

Cited by:

Related to: 10