Category-specific enhancement of retrieval due to field perspective

Two memory perspectives have been distinguished: A field perspective where events are re-experienced in the first person, and an observer perspective where events are witnessed in the third person. Two experiments examined the influence of memory perspective on objective memory performance. In both experiments participants were presented with a series of verbal passages, each of which contained several different categories of information. For four of these categories (pertaining to affective reactions, physical sensations, psychological states, and associated ideas), recall was significantly higher when a field perspective was adopted than when an observer perspective was adopted, but for the five other categories (pertaining to physical actions, personal appearance, fine details, spatial relations, and peripheral details) there was no significant effect of perspective upon recall. The study is examined in the context of mental models and imagined episodic events

An investigation into the relationship between visual imagery and stress

Visual imagery plays a functional role in memory and emotion processing. Similar links between stress, memory and emotion also exist, leading to the proposed hypothesis that there may also be a functional relationship between stress and visual imagery. In 36 students, trait vividness of visual imagery was assessed in relation to two variables: trait stress reactivity and acute stress response. The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and a matched control condition were used to induce stress. The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionaire (VVIQ) and Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale (PSRS) were used as trait measures of visual imagery vividness and stress reactivity respectively. Neither the relationship between vividness of visual imagery and stress reactivity or acute stress response were significant. These findings suggest that stress and visual imagery may not be as closely related as thought. However, significant gender differences seen in the sample and proposed in the literature led to exploratory analyses. These analyses revealed a significant effect of stress-reactive group (high/low) on visual imagery in women, such that low stress reactive individuals experienced more vivid visual imagery and vice versa. Additionally, in women only, the hypothesised inverse relationships: between visual imagery vividness and both trait and acute stress were found to have moderate and strong correlations that were approaching significance, respectively. Given that this was post-hoc analysis, firm conclusions cannot be drawn, although this suggests that the proposed inverse relationship between voluntary visual imagery and stress may exist in women in the healthy population

Effects of Visual Perspective in Video Games on Activity Construals and Behavioural Intentions

The perspective from which people view or imagine a situation has downstream effects on the construal of that situation and subsequent cognitions and behaviours. My study suggests that these effects from the mental and visual imagery literature carry over to the domain of interactive media, specifically video gaming. I manipulated whether 82 undergraduates played a motorcycle racing video game from either the first-person perspective or the third-person perspective and had participants rate the perceived risk of a list of 24 different inherently risky activities and then rate their willingness to engage in the same activities. Participants who had played the video game from the third-person perspective perceived the activities as more risky than participants in the first-person perspective. Furthermore, participants in the third-person perspective condition reported less willingness to engage in the risky activities than those in the first-person condition. Mediation analysis confirms that the effect of perspective on willingness to take risks is mediated by risk perceptions. Implications are discussed for the literatures on visual perspective, action construal and detrimental effects of video gaming