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

Abstract

Aphantasia is the condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery. So far, behavioural differences between aphantasics and non-aphantasics have hardly been studied as the base rate of those affected is quite low. The aim of the study was to examine if attentional guidance in aphantasics is impaired by their lack of visual imagery. In two visual search tasks, an already established one by Moriya (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80(5), 1127-1142, 2018) and a newly developed one, we examined whether aphantasics are primed less by their visual imagery than non-aphantasics. The sample in Study 1 consisted of 531 and the sample in Study 2 consisted of 325 age-matched pairs of aphantasics and non-aphantasics. Moriya's Task was not capable of showing the expected effect, whereas the new developed task was. These results could mainly be attributed to different task characteristics. Therefore, a lack of attentional guidance through visual imagery in aphantasics can be assumed and interpreted as new evidence in the imagery debate, showing that mental images actually influence information processing and are not merely epiphenomena of propositional processing.

Keywords: Aphantasia; Attentional guidance; Imagery debate; Visual attention; Visual imagery; Visual search.

Fig. 1

Example of an incongruent trial in Moriya’s Task. Figure adapted based on Moriya (2018)

Fig. 2

Reaction times (A) and error rates (B) in Moriya’s Task, dependent on group and priming condition. Depicted are means ± 1 SEM

Fig. 3

Example of a word and an image trial in the Spontaneous Use of Visual Imagery Visual Search Task (SUVI Task)

Fig. 4

Reaction times (A) and error rates (B) in the Spontaneous Use of Visual Imagery Visual Search Task, dependent on group and priming condition. Depicted are means ± 1 SEM