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 all sense 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.

Behavioral and neural signatures of visual imagery vividness extremes: Aphantasia vs. Hyperphantasia

“…Yet the experience of imagery proves to be highly variable. We have recently described individuals with a lifelong lack of visual imagery, or "aphantasia," and others whose imagery is "as vivid as real seeing" or "hyperphantasia" (Zeman et al 2015;Zeman et al 2020). Here, we report the first systematic study of the neuropsychological and neural signatures of aphantasia and hyperphantasia.…”

“…Using his "breakfast table questionnaire" that invited participants to rate the "illumination, definition and coloring" of "your breakfast table as you sat down to it this morning," Galton recognized that in some participants "the powers [of visualization] are zero" (p. 306). However, this phenomenon, the lifelong absence of a mind's eye, has been almost entirely neglected until our recent descriptions (Zeman et al 2015;Zeman et al 2020). The only exception is a study suggesting that 2-3% of the undergraduate population are "lifelong non-imagers" (Faw 2009).…”

Perceived and mentally rotated contents are differentially represented in cortical depth of V1

“…Future studies could directly link fine-grained cortical feedback patterns to an individual's ability to successfully conjure up mental representations during mental rotation [45][46][47] and mental imagery 48,49 . Such studies may also help to reveal imbalances between feedforward and feedback signals that lead to aphantasia [50][51][52] , hallucinations or other perceptual disturbances 53,54 -and eventually treat these symptoms in the future.…”

Mental imagery: pulling the plug on perceptualism

“…11 Furthermore, many puzzles exist concerning the condition's relation to memory, dreaming, creativity, etc. (Dawes et al, 2020;Zeman et al, 2020; see also Whiteley forthcoming). These controversies won't matter for my purposes.…”