Involuntary mental imagery is influenced by visual salience
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".