Colors in Mind: A Novel Paradigm to Investigate Pure Color Imagery
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BORIS DOI
Date of Publication
July 2015
Publication Type
Article
Division/Institute
Contributor
Borst, Grégoire |
Subject(s)
Series
Journal of experimental psychology - learning, memory, and cognition
ISSN or ISBN (if monograph)
0278-7393
Publisher
American Psychological Association
Language
English
Publisher DOI
PubMed ID
25419823
Description
Mental color imagery abilities are commonly measured using paradigms that involve naming, judging, or comparing the colors of visual mental images of well-known objects (e.g., “Is a sunflower darker yellow than a lemon”?). Although this approach is widely used in patient studies, differences in the ability to perform such color comparisons might simply reflect participants’ general knowledge of object colors rather than their ability to generate accurate visual mental images of the colors of the objects. The aim of the present study was to design a new color imagery paradigm. Participants were asked to visualize a color for 3 s and then to determine a visually presented color by pressing 1 of 6 keys. The authors reasoned that participants would react faster when the imagined and perceived colors were congruent than when they were incongruent. In Experiment 1, participants were slower in incongruent than congruent trials but only when they were instructed to visualize the colors. The results in Experiment 2 demonstrate that the congruency effect reported in Experiment 1 cannot be attributed to verbalization of the color that had to be visualized. Finally, in Experiment 3, the congruency effect evoked by mental imagery correlated with performance in a perceptual version of the task. The authors discuss these findings with respect to the mechanisms that underlie mental imagery and patients suffering from color imagery deficits.
File(s)
File | File Type | Format | Size | License | Publisher/Copright statement | Content | |
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ColorImagery_Manuscript_R2.pdf | text | Adobe PDF | 244.65 KB | publisher | accepted |