Does Visual Imagery Share Representations With Visual Working Memory?

Visual imagery is a process of "seeing with the mind’s eye".It can help people simulate and predict various situations in thinking and creativity,and participate in numerous cognitive activities such as spatial navigation,problem-solving,emotion regulation,and is closely related to memory,language comprehension,decision-making,and even the entire learning process.Previous research has shown that both visual imagery and visual working memory are capacity limitated and are susceptible to interference from irrelevant visual information,and the brain regions activated by both processes have a large overlap.These findings suggest that visual imagery and visual working memory may share representations.However,other studies have found that compared to the representations in visual working memory,the representations in visual imagery are less stable,more susceptible to interference from irrelevant information,and can be reconstructed by visual working memory.These results seem to suggest that visual imagery and visual working memory may have different representations.Currently,research on visual imagery mainly focuses on exploring its form and generation mechanism,and there is a lack of direct comparison between the characteristics of the representations of visual imagery and visual working memory,especially the direct evidence of their shared representations.This study aims to investigate whether visual imagery shares representations with visual working memory,in order to further elucidate the representation mechanism of visual imagery.The exploration of this issue will contribute to a deeper understanding of the representation mechanism of visual imagery and provide evidence for building a comprehensive theory of visual information processing.Two studies consisting of seven experiments were conducted to systematically investigate whether visual imagery shares characteristics with visual working memory and determines whether they share representations.Study 1(Experiments 1 to 3)tested whether visual imagery could produce similar effects as visual working memory representations.The classic effects of visual working memory representations were used to investigate whether visual imagery could facilitate unconscious processing(Experiment 1),guide attentional effects(Experiment 2),and influence motion perception(Experiment 3).The results of the three experiments consistently showed that visual imagery representations had an impact on other cognitive processes,and the effects produced were not different from those of visual working memory representations.This provided preliminary evidence for visual imagery representation in visual working memory.Study 2(Experiments 4 to 7)investigated whether visual imagery shares representation mechanisms with visual working memory.Experiments 4 and 5 aimed to explore whether the representation of visual imagery occupies visual working memory capacity.The results showed that when visual working memory capacity reached its limit,the representation of visual imagery impaired visual working memory performance(Experiment 4).Additionally,the representation of visual imagery also increased the amplitude of contralateral delay activity(CDA)waves,indicating an increase in the number of items held in visual working memory(Experiment 5).The consistent findings of Experiments 4 and 5 suggest that the representation of visual imagery occupies visual working memory capacity.Finally,Experiments 6 and 7investigated whether the representation of visual imagery can be integrated with the representation of visual working memory.The results showed that not only can visual imagery and visual working memory representations be bound together erroneously(Experiment 6),but they can also be organized into a holistic representation based on Gestalt principles(Experiment 7).The representations of visual imagery and visual working memory can integrate information between them.Taken together,the results of both studies lead to the following main conclusions:(1)visual imagery shares similar characteristics with visual working memory and can produce similar effects.(2)the representation of visual imagery occupies visual working memory capacity.(3)the representation of visual imagery can be integrated with the representation of visual working memory.These consistent findings demonstrate that visual imagery and visual working memory share representation mechanisms.