How is aphantasia measured, and is it always the same?
People who think they have aphantasia might actually have face recognition issues, and those with true aphantasia have diverse sensory deficits.
Source
Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style
Inspect source passages
How is aphantasia measured, and is it always the same?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
2,871 participants
First, we conducted an online sampling study (Study 1: N = 2,871) using the VVIQ, self-identification of a reduction in visual imagery, Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery (QMI), and Verbalizer-Visualizer Questionnaire (VVQ).
774 participants
We used the data of 774 participants (351 males, 421 females, and 2 with no answers; mean age = 40.8 years, SD = 10.6) in the analysis and excluded 42 participants who provided incomplete responses.
What they did
The researchers surveyed a large sample of Japanese adults across multiple online investigations to compare different ways of identifying aphantasia. In the first phase of research, they analyzed survey data from 2,871 participants who completed measures of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive processing styles. In the second phase, they gathered data from 774 new participants to test whether face recognition difficulties explain why self-identification rates of aphantasia are so much higher than rates measured by standardized visual imagery questionnaires.
What they found
The research revealed that 3.7% of participants met the standardized questionnaire threshold for aphantasia, while 12.1% self-identified as having the condition. This gap appears to be driven by face recognition ability; participants with poor face processing often falsely self-identified as having aphantasia because the self-identification question asked about visualizing a friend's face. Additionally, the study showed that individuals with aphantasia are diverse, with some lacking all forms of sensory imagery and others specifically lacking only visual imagery.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study cannot establish a direct causal pathway between poor face recognition and subjective reporting of aphantasia. Because the entire sample consisted of Japanese adults, the findings might not generalize to other global populations with different cultural backgrounds. Lastly, the research relied entirely on subjective self-report questionnaires, meaning that objective laboratory performance tests are needed to confirm these patterns of mental imagery.
Key terms
- Aphantasia
- A cognitive condition characterized by an inability or significantly reduced ability to voluntarily create mental visual images.
- Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)
- A widely used self-report tool that measures the clarity and detail of a person's voluntary visual mental imagery.
- Multisensory imagery
- The cognitive ability to mentally simulate sensory experiences across various modalities, such as hearing, touch, taste, or smell, in addition to sight.
- Prosopagnosia
- A cognitive condition characterized by the inability or impairment in recognizing familiar faces, sometimes called face blindness.
- Cognitive style
- The consistent individual preferences in how people perceive, remember, organize, and process information, such as relying more on verbal or visual strategies.
- Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery (QMI)
- A psychological questionnaire used to evaluate the vividness of mental imagery across multiple different sensory modalities.
Flashcards
0 of 35 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
How is aphantasia primarily defined in this study?
Common questions
Why is there such a big difference between people who say they have aphantasia and those who test positive for it?
Many people who think they have aphantasia actually struggle with face recognition instead of overall visual imagery. Because informal screening questions often ask if you can visualize a friend's face, people with face recognition issues may incorrectly assume they cannot visualize anything at all, even though they can imagine non-face objects normally.
Does having aphantasia mean you cannot imagine any sensory experiences?
Not necessarily. The study found that aphantasia is diverse. Some individuals have multisensory aphantasia, meaning they cannot imagine sounds, smells, or physical touch, whereas others have visual aphantasia, meaning their imagery deficits are strictly limited to sight.
What role does cognitive style play in aphantasia?
While typical adults often show a clear preference for either visual processing or verbal processing, people with aphantasia showed highly non-specific cognitive styles. This suggests that the standard tools used to measure visual-versus-verbal thinking do not capture the unique ways people with visual imagery deficits process information.
How did the researchers determine that face recognition was the confounding factor?
In their second study, they measured face recognition skills using a specialized scale. They found a significant correlation between visual imagery scores and face recognition abilities specifically in the group that self-reported aphantasia but scored normally on the standardized imagery test, confirming that face processing deficits skewed their self-assessments.
More on Perception