Sam Schwarzkopf

Some of these could still be from self-fulfilling prophecies (if you think your imagery is 0 in vividness then perhaps you don't bother in other questions) but at least some of these results speak against that (like the dream questions or the spontaneous contents of people's imagery).

Yes this is at the core of my interest in this. Right now these vividness questions are too open-ended. In future work we want to devise ways to titrate this better relative to other experiences. But the interesting thing in our present results is how much even these vague questions relate to.

Brains contain neurons. It doesn't contain images*. Neither does the JPG on your computer hard drive (Not that I am a big fan of software allegories but it works in this case).

(* Technically, the only exception is the retina which is arguably part of the brain but it "contains" an actual image.)

Depends on what you call "exists" or "image". Strictly speaking, the brain doesn't contain images of any kind and that is independent of the mental imagery debate. But that's also missing the point of this debate.

But here is the funny thing: it's not like I cannot do that. I just do it inside my head (or rather somewhere else outside my head). I don't "see" a plane zooming through the church but in my mind I know exactly what that looks like. Is that the same thing? I still don't really know... 🤷‍♂️

The more I learn about this the more I think that talking about aphants like it affects all senses equally in everyone is part of the problem. Our study was specifically about vision but I think people range widely in their inner senses.

Well it's confounded by lots of things, such as whether you actually remember dreaming. But I met people who say they dream, but not visually.

Doesn't matter what you call it but it's logically fallacious.

Now you're adding in reverse inference (which remains popular as ever in cognitive neuroscience...) 😉

This is exactly the problem inherent with so much #mentalimagery research: without any objective external reference to validate this, it is no better (& most likely worse...) than simply asking people how clear & detailed their imagery is. Because it is literally the same question in disguise.

Depends on how you define it. Like with #aphantasia I'd say we need a much stricter definition. Based on that I don't think there were any hyperaphantasics in our study although that's hard to say as we would need better tests for that. But based on conventional definitions (VVIQ): yes.

But your nugget test simply replaces one kind of subjective self-report with another. It isn't addressing the epistemological problem. Your test cannot be validated. But more importantly, even if we -could- validate it, we wouldn't know if that measures people's capacity for imagery.

You are falling into the same epistemological trap so much of this research has been stuck in. We aren't at the point of using stop watch. We don't even know if people are running or cycling or swimming or if anyone is moving anywhere at all. You can't do quantitative science on this without that.

No. As we argue in the paper this is exactly -not- the case. The VVIQ is surprisingly useful and I say this as a long time critic of this test. Perhaps it just correlates with a lot of self-reports of things people think happen inside their minds - but even if that's the case this is important...

(* whatever 'literal' means we aren't sure about either - it continues to cause debate 😏)

Yes definitely. In fact I know someone who says they only imagine touch. The self-categorising question where the apple is in front of the head could in theory be interpreted as "feeling" the apple in front of the head but not seeing anything. We didn't go into the non-visual aspects at all so far.

Well I think that depends :
For someone who sees it before them, they could presumably follow their mental lines? I wouldn't know because for me, I just draw what it looks like in my head. But for an aphant I know, they don't do it. They can only copy what they can see with their eyes.

For me dreams (and hypgnagia and Tetris hallucinations etc) are definitely "seen" whereas mental imagery is not. Probably not the same for everyone though. Many people don't see their dreams apparently...

But either way, what you describe sounds a lot like seeing -something- to me. For me the choices on C and D are always unambigously the left one (black only).

The question is about taking the best match. There is never going to be a perfect exemplar but you need to start somewhere. Interestingly in Exp 1 hardly anyone chose the greyscale apple which may be telling (but less clear in Exp 2).

The problem is that we don't really have the language for this. But as we say in discussion, we'd like to go to experiments where we try to calibrate the experience relative to other experiences like dreams, afterimages, etc. I think this might help disambiguate this more.

🤯

Yes there is always a risk of semantic confusion that will be hard (impossible?) to control completely. But as you say we went to great lengths to be explicit. In one question (not shown on figure unfortunately) we actually explicitly asked about whether they experience images "floating" before them

I'm not saying the beach cartoon alone is sufficient (as we did in Exp 2). Rather we should probably combine it with some other diverse questions, perhaps a few VVIQ items, different cartoon questions, & more general questions such as whether people visualise fiction or daily imagery use.

Just one more point: we also found that our beach cartoon question correlated strongly with VVIQ2 scores. In fact, this correlation is stronger than most VVIQ items correlate with each other. Combined with how tedious & repetitive the VVIQ is, I believe it's high time we put that instrument to rest

Intriguingly, vividness is also a good predictor of how much extraneous visual detail people spontaneously come up with when asked e.g. to "think of a pink elephant". If asked to think of a banana, typical VVIQ folks tend to immediately know if it has black spots.

But some of the other data also argues against this. Much to our (at least my) surprise, VVIQ/vividness scores strongly correlate with all sorts of other internally generated visions, such as how clear or vivid your dreams are, how often you get hypnagogic hallucinations or the Tetris effect.

2. Alternatively, people might just differ in how literally they take our (very explicitly literal) instructions. Perhaps there is a difference between seeing & quasi-seeing (as @sulfaro.bsky.social might call it). I don't fully grasp what that might be like but I cannot rule it out...

This could mean different things:

1. People who "see" images might see them faintly or strongly - if so they would probably use that to judge vividnessness. People who don't "see" but nevertheless visualise will probably judge other attributes (detail? extent? effort?)

The different coloured dots show how people self-categorise themselves into four groups (see first figure at top of thread). I won't go into much detail here, except that the Verbaliser group consistently scores low on any such measures, while groups endorsing the depictive imagery forms vary lots