Imagine, and you will find – Lack of attentional guidance through visual imagery in aphantasics

Abstract

Aphantasia is the condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery. So far, behavioural differences between aphantasics and non-aphantasics have hardly been studied as the base rate of those affected is quite low. The aim of the study was to examine if attentional guidance in aphantasics is impaired by their lack of visual imagery. In two visual search tasks, an already established one by Moriya (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80(5), 1127-1142, 2018) and a newly developed one, we examined whether aphantasics are primed less by their visual imagery than non-aphantasics. The sample in Study 1 consisted of 531 and the sample in Study 2 consisted of 325 age-matched pairs of aphantasics and non-aphantasics. Moriya’s Task was not capable of showing the expected effect, whereas the new developed task was. These results could mainly be attributed to different task characteristics. Therefore, a lack of attentional guidance through visual imagery in aphantasics can be assumed and interpreted as new evidence in the imagery debate, showing that mental images actually influence information processing and are not merely epiphenomena of propositional processing.

Memory deficits in aphantasics are not restricted to autobiographical memory – Perspectives from the Dual Coding Approach

“…Fifth, the usage of the VVIQ as self‐report measure of aphantasia underlies the limitations of metacognitive judgements (Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel, 2007; see Zeman et al., 2020, for a more extensive discussion) and could therefore make our samples more heterogeneous. However, the validity of the VVIQ as self‐report instrument is backed up by many objective measures of visual imagery such as binocular rivalry (Keogh & Pearson, 2018) or reaction times (Monzel et al., 2021). Furthermore, more heterogeneous samples would make our testing only more conservative, yet, performance differences were found.…”

“…Furthermore, verbal–visual complementary and competition effects should be investigated more closely, such as intersensory facilitation (Colonius & Diederich, 2012; Monzel et al., 2021) or the verbal overshadowing effect (Schooler & Engstler‐Schooler, 1990). Since verbal overshadowing occurs when information is processed verbally after being processed visually, it is questionable whether this effect can occur in aphantasics at all or whether aphantasics do perform worse in the first place.…”

“…Since the Reverse Hierarchy Model (Pearson, 2019) assumes mental images to be weaker perceptions, it is plausible to assume that the effect is transferable to imagery modalities. This is shown, for example, in the generally faster reaction times of non-aphantasics in comparison to aphantasics in visual search tasks (Monzel et al, 2021), since non-aphantasics can use both verbal and visual representations of target stimuli. However, again, Milton et al (2020) did not find differences between aphantasics and non-aphantasics using the LMT (immediate recall; Wechsler, 1997), and Zeman et al (2010) did not find differences in the Auditory Immediate Index of the WMS (Wechsler, 1997).…”

“…While first approaches to aphantasia were mainly based on self‐report (Dawes, Keogh, Andrillon, & Pearson, 2020; Zeman et al., 2015, 2020), behavioural differences in objective tasks have recently been found, providing evidence that aphantasia is not merely metacognitive in nature, but the virtual inability to generate mental images. For example, Keogh and Pearson (2018) as well as Monzel, Keidel, and Reuter (2021) found that aphantasics, in contrast to non‐aphantasics, cannot be primed by their own imagery. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to investigate the effects of aphantasia, since many tasks that ostensibly require visual imagery can also be solved by non‐visual alternative strategies, such as the reliance on verbalization (Jacobs, Schwarzkopf, & Silvanto, 2018; Zeman et al., 2010).…”

“…Since the Reverse Hierarchy Model (Pearson, 2019) assumes mental images to be weaker perceptions, it is plausible to assume that the effect is transferable to imagery modalities. This is shown, for example, in the generally faster reaction times of non‐aphantasics in comparison to aphantasics in visual search tasks (Monzel et al., 2021), since non‐aphantasics can use both verbal and visual representations of target stimuli. However, again, Milton et al.…”