Visual perspective (first-person vs. third-person) is a salient characteristic of memory and mental imagery with important cognitive and behavioural consequences. Most work on visual perspective treats it as a unidimensional construct. However, third-person perspective can have opposite effects on emotion and motivation, sometimes intensifying these and other times acting as a distancing mechanism, as in PTSD. For this reason among others, we propose that visual perspective in memory and mental imagery is best understood as varying along two dimensions: first, the degree to which first-person perspective predominates in the episodic imagery, and second, the degree to which the self is visually salient from a third-person perspective. We show that, in episodic future thinking, these are anticorrelated but non-redundant. These results further our basic understanding of the potent but divergent effects visual perspective has on emotion and motivation, both in everyday life and in psychiatric conditions.

视觉视角（第一人称与第三人称）是记忆和心理意象的显着特征，具有重要的认知和行为后果。大多数关于视觉透视的工作将其视为一维结构。然而，第三人称视角会对情绪和动机产生相反的影响，有时会加剧这些影响，有时会作为一种疏远机制，如 PTSD。出于这个原因，我们建议最好将记忆和心理意象中的视觉透视理解为沿两个维度变化：首先，第一人称视角在情节意象中占主导地位的程度，其次，自我的程度从第三人称的角度来看，在视觉上很突出。我们表明，在情景式未来思维中，这些是反相关但非冗余的。