Eye-movement changes in Visual Imagery: Differences knowledge or skills representation?

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (5) : 1039-1046.

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PDF(7728 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (5) : 1039-1046.

Eye-movement changes in Visual Imagery: Differences knowledge or skills representation?

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Abstract

Visual imagery is an important visuo-spatial representation, which has the same mental storage characteristics with visual perception (Romke, Kosslyn, & Hamel, 1997), sharing the same brain mechanisms with visual perception (Kosslyn, Thompson, & Alpert, 1997; Ganis, Thompson & Kosslyn, 2004). As is known to all, fixation is the primary source of visual perception information, and eye movement is very important to visual perception. So, does eye movement also play an important role in the visual imagery processing? There are two contrasting accounts for the phenomenon. The functional account hypothesizes that the encoding of each eye fixation during perception process participates, as an index in the location of the space in the subsequent image generation. Recently, researchers found that subjects who fixed their gaze centrally during perception did the same spontaneously during imagery. The subjects who are free to explore during perception, but maintaining central fixation during imagery, showed decreased ability to recall the pattern. They concluded that the eye scan paths during visual imagery reenact those of perception of the same visual scene and eye movements during mental imagery are not epiphenomenal but assist the process of image generation (Brandt & Stark, 1997; Laeng & Teodorescu, 2002). Actually, whether regular eye movements promote the representation processing relies on the level of eye movement regularity of change that regular change task information accessibility of visual imagery would cause. If task information accessibility level change inevitably leads to eye movement regularity changes, it can be inferred that eye movements play a functional role in visual imagery. Based on the experimental paradigm of imagery evoked by speech, the effect of information access of motor imagery eye-movement was investigated. Experiment 1 with no triple jump professional skills and knowledge of the sport is also low cognitive level students were tested , the results show that with the increase of the level of representation of task information accessible, eye gaze point average duration shorter the average saccade distance increases and the average saccade time becomes longer, which is the existing research results are consistent; knowledge learning and skills training to characterize the level of the experimental characterization of the appearance of two pairs of manipulation tasks were carried out in the experimental task knowledge and professional skills training to learn human subjects, results showed that subjects with the acquisition of knowledge and skills to improve the ability to characterize the level of fixation task information accessible in different levels of representation between the average duration, average saccade distance and average saccade time difference will disappear, but knowledge and learning and skills characterize differences in average saccade time differences, skills -based subjects whose average saccade time should be shorter than the knowledge of learning subjects, reached critical levels significantly, no difference in the average fixation duration and average saccade distance.

Key words

visual imagery / eye-movement / accessibility / knowledge / skills

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Eye-movement changes in Visual Imagery: Differences knowledge or skills representation?[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2014, 37(5): 1039-1046
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