Abstract
Individual variability in imagery experiences has long attracted the interest of philosophers, educators, and psychologists. Since Aristotle’s time, it was assumed that imagery is a universal ability, so everyone possesses it. Galton first measured the vividness of subjective imagery experiences, and discovered that some individuals reported zero imagination. Recent research has coined the term “aphantasia” — an inability to form mental imagery, or having a “blind mind’s eye” (Zeman, Dewar, & Della Sala, 2015). We argue that there may be more than one type of aphantasia. Substantial behavioral and neuropsychological evidence has demonstrated a distinction between visual-object imagery (mental visualization of pictorial properties such as color, shape, brightness, and texture) and visual-spatial imagery (mental visualization of spatial locations, relations, and transformations). Notably, visual imagery is not a unitary ability, so individuals who excel in object imagery do not necessarily excel in spatial imagery, and vice versa. Here we argue that the commonly described “aphantasia” is not a general imagery deficit but rather a visual-object deficit of imagery (as aphantasic people are often identified by low scores on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, which assesses object imagery only). We hypothesize that “spatial aphantasia” (the inability to imagine spatial properties and relationships) can be a separate type of imagery deficit. Individuals with spatial aphantasia may not necessarily have a deficit in object imagery. We discuss future research directions examining how spatial aphantasia may manifest behaviorally and neurologically, and how object and spatial aphantasia may be related
Highlights
Individual variability in imagery experiences has long attracted the interest of philosophers, educators, and psychologists
Evidence from neuroscience and neuropsychology has demonstrated that, in terms of neural substrate, this distinction is based on the dorsal and ventral visual cortical pathways (Farah, 1988; Farah, Hammond, Levine, & Calvanio, 1988; Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Mazard, Tzourio-Mazoyer, Crivello, Mazoyer, & Mellet, 2004) while individual differences research described these two aspects of visual imagery as two dissociable abilities: individuals who excel in object imagery were found to not necessarily excel in spatial imagery and vice versa (Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov, 2010; Kozhevnikov, Hegarty, & Mayer, 2002; Kozhevnikov, Kosslyn, & Shepard, 2005)
Unlike many previous imagery questionnaires that lacked criterion validity, the object imagery scale of the Object-Spatial Imagery Questionnaire (OSIQ) significantly correlated with performance on object imagery tasks and predicted interest and membership in artistic specializations, while the spatial imagery scale significantly correlated with performance on spatial imagery tasks and predicted interest and membership in STEM specializations
Summary
Recent research has coined the term “aphantasia” to refer to an inability to form mental imagery or having a “blind mind’s eye” (Zeman, Dewar, & Della Sala, 2015). Cutting-edge research examining differences between people with aphantasia and those with hyperphantasia (individuals with extremely vivid imagery, Cossins, 2019; Zeman, MacKisack, & Onians, 2018) was initiated by Adam Zeman’s lab in the UK and Joel Pearson’s lab in Australia. According to Google Scholar, there were only about twenty publications with “aphantasia” in the title between 2015 – 2019 (and none before), while there were about fifteen thousand publications with “imagery” in title in the same period In this opinion paper, we argue that there may be more than one type of aphantasia and that previous aphantasia research considered only one facet of imagery deficits while neglecting the other. Our “two eyes of the blind mind” hypothesis is based on the established distinction be-
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