Clarifying aphantasia

Abstract

In a series of four studies, relationships between subjective and objective measurements of mental imagery vividness and use were examined for participants with developmental aphantasia compared to control participants. Study 1 reports demographic differences and results from subjective measurements of mental imagery. Subjective scores of control participants were impacted by an instructional video manipulation, showing that control participants may be naïve about individual differences in mental imagery. Study 2 examined the relationship between a conventionally used measure of mental imagery, the VVIQ, and several cognitive tasks previously reported by the literature to be related to mental imagery vividness: the backwards spelling task, the snowy pictures task, and the tail length task. Study 2 found that none of those three tasks seem appropriate for research into developmental aphantasia due to no detectable group differences in performance after accounting for both accuracy and response times, and no reliable relationships with VVIQ scores. Study 3 makes use of an established imagery paradigm, mental scanning, and applies the square donut scanning task in a novel way to developmental aphantasia research. Study 3 demonstrates an important interaction between the difficulty of the task and group (aphantasia vs. control) of the participants, revealing an objective cognitive difference between the groups. Study 4 uses a change identification task to also demonstrate that there is a significant difference in the cognitive strategy used by the aphantasia group relative to the controls, made evident by significant interactions between trial complexity and group as measured by trial performance

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