Some recent research.
‘Phantasia – The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes’
The Eye’s Mind’s latest paper Phantasia – The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes is in press with the journal Cortex. With findings based on data from 2400 participants, the paper is the first major scientific output made possible by the wide public interest in imagery extremes.
Key findings:
aphantasia is associated with scientific and mathematical occupations, hyperphantasia is associated with ‘creative’ professions participants with aphantasia report an elevated rate of difficulty with face recognition and autobiographical memory, participants with hyperphantasia report an elevated rate of synaesthesia around half those with aphantasia describe an absence of wakeful imagery in all sense modalities, while a majority dream visually aphantasia appears to run within families more often than would be expected by chance
‘A cognitive profile of multi-sensory imagery, memory and dreaming in aphantasia’
Abstract
For most people, visual imagery is an innate feature of many of our internal experiences, and appears to play a critical role in supporting core cognitive processes. Some individuals, however, lack the ability to voluntarily generate visual imagery altogether – a condition termed “aphantasia”. Recent research suggests that aphantasia is a condition defined by the absence of visual imagery, rather than a lack of metacognitive awareness of internal visual imagery. Here we further illustrate a cognitive “fingerprint” of aphantasia, demonstrating that compared to control participants with imagery ability, aphantasic individuals report decreased imagery in other sensory domains, although not all report a complete lack of multi-sensory imagery. They also report less vivid and phenomenologically rich autobiographical memories and imagined future scenarios, suggesting a constructive role for visual imagery in representing episodic events. Interestingly, aphantasic individuals report fewer and qualitatively impoverished dreams compared to controls. However, spatial abilities appear unaffected, and aphantasic individuals do not appear to be considerably protected against all forms of trauma symptomatology in response to stressful life events. Collectively, these data suggest that imagery may be a normative representational tool for wider cognitive processes, highlighting the large inter-individual variability that characterises our internal mental representations.