Cueing color imagery: A critical analysis of imagery-perception congruency effects

The relation between mental imagery and visual perception is a long debated topic in experimental psychology. In a recent study, Wantz, Borst, Mast, and Lobmaier (2015) demonstrated that color imagery could benefit color perception in a task that involved generating imagery in response to a cue prior to a forced-choice color discrimination task. Here, we scrutinized whether the method of Wantz et al. warrants strong inferences about the role of color imagery in color perception. In Experiments 1-3, we demonstrate that the imagery effect reported by Wantz et al. does replicate nicely using their method but does not occur when cue-target contingencies and a redundancy between the imagery and response dimensions are removed from their method. In Experiments 4-6, we explored cued imagery effects further using a method in which the cued imagery dimension was orthogonal to the response dimension. The results of these experiments demonstrate that a compelling endogenously cued imagery effect does not occur for lone targets but does occur for singleton color targets embedded amid homogenous color distractors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).