When remembering or imagining, people can experience an event from their own eyes, or as an outside observer, with differing levels of vividness. The perspective from, and vividness with, which a person remembers or imagines has been related to numerous individual difference characteristics. These findings require that phenomenology during mental time travel be trait-like—that people consistently experience similar perspectives and levels of vividness. This assumption remains untested. Across two studies (combined N = 295), we examined the stability of visual perspective and vividness across multiple trials and timepoints. Perspective and vividness showed weak within-session stability when reported across just a few trials but showed strong within-session stability when sufficient trials were collected. Importantly, both visual perspective and vividness demonstrated good-to-excellent across-session stability across different delay intervals (two days to six weeks). Overall, our results suggest that people dependably experience similar visual phenomenology across occurrences of mental time travel.

在记忆或想象时，人们可以通过自己的眼睛或作为外部观察者来体验一个事件，其生动程度各不相同。一个人记忆或想象的视角和生动性与许多个体差异特征有关。这些发现要求精神时间旅行中的现象学具有特征——人们始终如一地体验相似的观点和生动程度。这个假设仍然未经检验。跨越两项研究（结合N = 295），我们检查了多个试验和时间点的视觉透视和生动性的稳定性。仅在少数试验中报告时，视角和生动性显示出较弱的会话内稳定性，但在收集到足够的试验时显示出较强的会话内稳定性。重要的是，视觉透视和生动性在不同的延迟间隔（两天到六周）中都表现出从良好到优秀的跨会话稳定性。总体而言，我们的结果表明，人们在心理时间旅行中可靠地体验到类似的视觉现象。