Phantasia–The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes

Abstract

Visual imagery typically enables us to see absent items in the mind's eye. It plays a role in memory, day-dreaming and creativity. Since coining the terms aphantasia and hyperphantasia to describe the absence and abundance of visual imagery, we have been contacted by many thousands of people with extreme imagery abilities. Questionnaire data from 2000 participants with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia indicate that aphantasia is associated with scientific and mathematical occupations, whereas hyperphantasia is associated with 'creative' professions. Participants with aphantasia report an elevated rate of difficulty with face recognition and autobiographical memory, whereas participants with hyperphantasia report an elevated rate of synaesthesia. Around half those with aphantasia describe an absence of wakeful imagery in allsense modalities, while a majority dream visually. Aphantasia appears to run within families more often than would be expected by chance. Aphantasia and hyperphantasia appear to be widespread but neglected features of human experience with informative psychological associations.

Individual Differences in Intertemporal Choice

“…Thus, future investigations should aim to replicate the effect found by Parthasarathi et al (2017) and to give evidence for potential explanations. A promising population within which to address these questions consists of participants with extremely low or high voluntary imagery (aphantasics and hyperphantasics, respectively; Zeman et al, 2020). Moreover, investigating interactions between episodic future thinking and self-report measures of imagery could help to determine the role of imagination abilities in temporal discounting.…”

“…Fourth, our review of the literature on cognitive styles showed that future studies would benefit from addressing the issue of task complexity. Additionally, a valuable approach would be to extend correlational designs in unselected samples to specific subpopulations with extreme expressions of relevant phenotypes, e.g., aphantasics or hyperphantasics (Zeman et al, 2020). Moreover, combinations of individual differences approaches with experimental challenges may be particularly informative in this context.…”

Unconscious mental imagery

“…In other words, aphantasia is not a monolithic category. Some aphantasics dream vivid dreams, clearly involving conscious visual imagery [76]. But they have problems with the control of conscious visual imagery.…”

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

“…Regardless of the exact mechanisms resulting in aphantasics being slower in image trials than non-aphantasics, priming through visual imagery could be used in the future to distinguish between aphantasics and non-aphantasics independently of self-reports (e.g. Zeman et al, 2015Zeman et al, , 2020, as self-report measures are rather unreliable due to the constraints of introspection (Schwitzgebel, 2002). The large uncertainty regarding self-assessment of one's own imagery abilities is also reflected in the fact that 27.7% and 28.6%, respectively, of the participants in our studies were not able to classify themselves as aphantasics or non-aphantasics with certainty.…”