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 interindividual variability that characterises our internal mental representations.

Aphantasia, imagination and dreaming

“…36 Early support for this claim is found in a recent study on aphantasia from Dawes et al (2020), who report that 'aphantasic individuals also reported experiencing lower awareness and control during their dreams [compared to control subjects]' (6). The most relevant phenomenon here of course are lucid dreams in which the subject is able to control and manipulate her visual dream imagery to some degree (whether or not lucid dreams where insight is present but not control could be included in this sort of study will largely depend upon the-currently open question-of know exactly insight should be understood, especially with respect to mental agency-Voss 2016; Kühle 2014).…”

“…13 Whilst it is well known that introspective reports regarding the vividness of mental imagery vary significantly amongst groups of individuals (McKelvie 1995;Phillips 2014), aphantasia is characterised by subjects-'aphantasics'-who typically describe themselves as not just as having mental imagery of a reduced vividness, or impaired capacities for mental imagery generation limited to certain visual kinds, but as lacking the capacity to generate (typically visual) mental imagery altogether. 14 The work on aphantasia, mental imagery and their neural bases is ongoing (Dawes et al 2020;Winlove et al 2018;Fulford et al 2018), however, the condition has been documented in a series of recent studies (Zeman et al , 2015 which aim to identify its central neurobehavioural features. 15 Produced as part of 'The Eye's Mind' AHRC Project at the Medical School at the University of Exeter, the first examines a form of imagery generation disorder exemplified in a single patient-MX-who lost the ability to generate visual imagery abruptly, aged 65, four days after a coronary angioplasty (see .…”

“…The imagination proponent owes us an explanation here. One suggestion-open to future empirical confirmation-is that the terms 'aphantasia' and 'hyperaphantasia' do not represent binary categories but are best understood as poles on an imagery vividness continuum (a hypothesis supported by McKelvie 1995 as well as a recent study on individual differences in aphantasic subjects from Dawes et al 2020). The suggestion then is that those aphantasics reporting no visual dream imagery fall at the extreme end of this spectrum, while those reporting visual dream imagery correspond to more 'moderate' forms of aphantasia.…”

“…Currently, no cases of lucid dreaming in subjects with aphantasia have been reported. 35 However, the 32 Dawes et al (2020) and Zeman (correspondence). 33 Voss et al (2018); Windt and Voss (2018) Saunders et al (2016) include recent meta-analyses and summaries of this work.…”

Mental imagery and visual working memory abilities appear to be unrelated in childhood: evidence for individual differences in strategy use

“…Given the overlap between visual perception and visual imagery, researchers have derived a measure of the sensory strength of visual images whereby the extent to which imagining one of two stimuli biases the subsequent perception of that stimuli presented in a binocular rivalry paradigm (Keogh & Pearson, 2017b;Pearson, Clifford, & Tong, 2008). Importantly, studies have shown that while those with Aphantasia score significantly lower on self-report measures of visual imagery and measures of imagery sensory strength compared to controls they report intact spatial imagery (Keogh & Pearson, 2017a) and spatial memory (Dawes, Keogh, Andrillon, & Pearson, 2020). Specifically, on the Object-Spatial Image questionnaire (Blajenkova, Kozhevnikov, & Motes, 2006) whereby object imagery is measured with questions such as "I can close my eyes and easily picture a scene that I have experienced" and spatial imagery is measured with questions such as "I can easily rotate 3D geometric figures", those with Aphantasia reported significantly lower object imagery compared controls, however their scores on spatial imagery were not different from controls (Keogh & Pearson, 2017a).…”