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Abstract:
Abstract: The debate about whether mental images can be
ambiguous has inspired several investigations, most of which
demonstrated that people are able to interpret visualized patterns
in novel ways. However, these studies familiarized the participants
with alternative interpretations of stimuli during the
instructions, which may have led participants to seek more than one
interpretation. Furthermore, little attention has been directed at
identifying individual differences observed in such tasks. In the
present study, the participants were naïve regarding the
purpose of the study. We used an ambiguous figure that changes its
appearance only when turned upside down (in one orientation, an old
woman; when rotated 180 deg, a young woman). The participants
inspected the figure, and later redrew it in that orientation from
memory. They drew the stimulus repeatedly, until a set of essential
features matched the original. Then, participants were asked to
mentally rotate a visual mental image of the stimulus from upright
to upside down, in 45 deg increments. Some participants
spontaneously reported the new interpretation of the imaged drawing
whereas others were given a series of hints and still resisted an
alternative interpretation. One striking result was that the
ability to transform mental representations, tested using an
independent task, was highly associated with spontaneous reports of
image reversals whereas other imagery abilities were not. F.W.M. is
supported by the Swiss NSF.
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