“Non-Commitment in Mental Imagery”, Eric J. Bigelow, John P. McCoy, Tomer D. Ullman2023-09 (illusion-of-depth bias)⁠:

[OSF, media] We examine non-commitment in the imagination. Across 5 studies (n > 1, 800), we find that most people are non-committal about basic aspects of their mental images, including features that would be readily apparent in real images. While previous work on the imagination has discussed the possibility of non-commitment, this paper is the first, to our knowledge, to examine this systematically and empirically.

We find that people do not commit to basic properties of specified mental scenes (Studies 1 & 2), and that people report non-commitment rather than uncertainty or forgetfulness (Study 3). Such non-commitment is present even for people with generally vivid imaginations, and those who report imagining the specified scene very vividly (Studies 4a & 4b).

People readily confabulate properties of their mental images when non-commitment is not offered as an explicit option (Study 5). Taken together, these results establish non-commitment as a pervasive component of mental imagery.

[Keywords: mental imagery, imagination, vividness, non-commitment]