Only minimal differences between individuals with congenital aphantasia and those with typical imagery on neuropsychological tasks that involve imagery

Pounder, Zoë; Jacob, Jane; Evans, Samuel; Loveday, Catherine; Eardley, Alison F.; Silvanto, Juha

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2021.12.010

Cited by 69 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Concerning the second point, the current study is, to our knowledge, the first to illustrate that aphantasia also encompasses an inability to engage in implicit motor simulations. This result extends recent investigations demonstrating the deterioration of implicit simulations during mental rotation (Pounder et al, 2022; Zeman et al, 2010; Zhao et al, 2022; but Milton et al, 2021) and involuntary simulations during night-time dreams (Dawes et al, 2020; Zeman et al, 2015, 2010; see review: Whiteley, 2020). As already described for motor imagery, we observed that, relative to rest, action observation increased corticospinal excitability in phantasics but not aphantasics.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Explicit and implicit motor simulations are impaired in individuals with aphantasia

DuPont

Papaxanthis

Madden-Lombardi

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Individuals with aphantasia report having difficulties or an inability to generate visual images of objects or events. So far, there is no evidence showing that this condition also impacts the motor system and the generation of motor simulations. We probed the neurophysiological marker of aphantasia during explicit and implicit forms of motor simulation, i.e., motor imagery and action observation, respectively. We tested a group of individuals without any reported imagery deficits (phantasics) as well as a group of individuals self-reporting the inability to form mental images (aphantasics). We instructed the participants to explicitly imagine a maximal pinch movement in the visual and kinesthetic modalities and to observe a video showing a pinch movement. By means of transcranial magnetic stimulation, we triggered motor-evoked potentials (MEP) in the target right index finger. As expected, MEP amplitude, a marker of corticospinal excitability, increased for phantasics during kinaesthetic motor imagery and action observation relative to rest but not during visual motor imagery. Interestingly, MEP amplitude did not increase in either form of motor simulation for the group of aphantasics. This result provides neurophysiological evidence that individuals living with aphantasia have a real deficit in activating the motor system during motor simulations.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Explicit and implicit motor simulations are impaired in individuals with aphantasia

DuPont

Papaxanthis

Madden-Lombardi

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…Further evidence regarding the role of working memory in consciousness comes from individuals with aphantasia, who do not experience vivid mental imagery. According to a preprint, these individuals can perform comparably to individuals with intact mental imagery in working memory tasks, such as mental rotation, which are often interpreted as involving the maintenance and manipulation of perceptual representations 43 . And yet, they do not consciously experience vivid imagery while doing so 44 .…”

Section: Theories Of Consciousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The mnemonic basis of subjective experience

et al. 2022

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Conscious experiences involve subjective qualities, such as colours, sounds, smells and emotions. In this Perspective, we argue that these subjective qualities can be understood in terms of their similarity to other experiences. This account highlights the role of memory in conscious experience, even for simple percepts. How an experience feels depends on implicit memory of the relationships between different perceptual representations within the brain. With more complex experiences such as emotions, explicit memories are also recruited. We draw inspiration from work in machine learning as well as the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision making to make our case and discuss how the account could be tested in future experiments. The resulting findings might help to reveal the functions of subjective experience and inform current theoretical debates on consciousness.

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“…VVIQ. To the proportions of aphantasia based on visual imagery, we used the VVIQ (Japanese version 25 ), which has been widely used to identify individuals with aphantasia 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 . The VVIQ consists of four subfactors, including multiple situations, such as "relative and friend," "rising sun," "familiar shop," and "country scene" 26 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The VVIQ consists of 16 items scored on a ve-point Likert scale and ranging from 16 to 80 points (lower scores on the VVIQ indicate weaker visual imagery vividness). Previous studies have used various ranges to identify aphantasia, such as VVIQ scores of 16 to 32 5,6,7,8,9 , 16 to 25 10,11 , and 16 to 23 12,13,14 . The previous stdy 7 reported proportions of aphantasia using a large sample (N = 1004) including undergraduate students and the general population.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the criteria for identifying aphantasia have not yet been determined, many studies have used the VVIQ criteria to identify aphantasia and have conducted perceptual and cognitive experiments to reveal the characteristics of people with aphantasia, focusing on tasks associated with visual imagery. Such tasks have included the binocular rivalry paradigm 16 , memory task 8, 12,15 , visual search task 18 , sensory sensitivity task 6 , neuropsychological test 11 , drawing task of real-world scenes 10 , skin conductance level for the emotion of imagery 9 , and pseudo-hallucinations 17 . The results generally indicated that people with aphantasia experienced lower performance because of their imagery absence when a task required the production of imagery.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of the capability for multi-sensory imagery

Takahashi

Saito

Omura

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Aphantasia is a characteristic in which people with normal perception have difficulty constructing their imagination. Most previous studies have used the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), with some using self-identification of the absence of visual imagery, but there is a discrepancy between the proportions of aphantasia in the population calculated by these two criteria. It is unclear why this difference exists and how many people actually cannot form imagery. Moreover, because visual imagery is mainly focused upon, other types of aphantasia, relating to multi-sensory imagery, have not been fully investigated. We conducted an online sampling with a large number of participants (N = 2,885) to compare the proportions of aphantasia calculated by these two visual criteria, obtaining data from the same participants, and investigate the cognitive profile of multi-sensory imagery. The participants completed the VVIQ and Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery (QMI) and self-identified an absence of visual imagery. The proportions were 3.67% under the VVIQ criteria (VVIQ ≤ 32) and 12.24% under the self-identification of the absence of visual imagery criteria, roughly replicating the proportions of previous reports. Combining these visual criteria, in the group for low VVIQ (VVIQ ≤ 32), some participants showed the absence of all sensory imagery, while others showed specifically an absence of visual imagery. Individuals with aphantasia, identified by visual criteria, may have been mixed with those experiencing multi-sensory aphantasia. Our present study indicates that visual criteria are not sufficient to define multiple types of aphantasia and proposes that evaluations with multi-sensory imagery may help further characterize aphantasia for other types of sensory modality.

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Only minimal differences between individuals with congenital aphantasia and those with typical imagery on neuropsychological tasks that involve imagery

Cited by 69 publications

References 71 publications

Explicit and implicit motor simulations are impaired in individuals with aphantasia

Explicit and implicit motor simulations are impaired in individuals with aphantasia

The mnemonic basis of subjective experience

Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of the capability for multi-sensory imagery

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