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Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style

Aphantasia—a condition wherein individuals have a reduced or absent construction of voluntary visual imagery—is diagnosed using either the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) or self-identification. However, a significant discrepancy exists between the proportions of aphantasia in the p...

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Autores principales: Takahashi, Junichi, Saito, Godai, Omura, Kazufumi, Yasunaga, Daichi, Sugimura, Shinichiro, Sakamoto, Shuichi, Horikawa, Tomoyasu, Gyoba, Jiro
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10403065/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37546458
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1174873
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author Takahashi, Junichi
Saito, Godai
Omura, Kazufumi
Yasunaga, Daichi
Sugimura, Shinichiro
Sakamoto, Shuichi
Horikawa, Tomoyasu
Gyoba, Jiro
author_facet Takahashi, Junichi
Saito, Godai
Omura, Kazufumi
Yasunaga, Daichi
Sugimura, Shinichiro
Sakamoto, Shuichi
Horikawa, Tomoyasu
Gyoba, Jiro
author_sort Takahashi, Junichi
collection PubMed
description Aphantasia—a condition wherein individuals have a reduced or absent construction of voluntary visual imagery—is diagnosed using either the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) or self-identification. However, a significant discrepancy exists between the proportions of aphantasia in the populations assessed using these two criteria. It is unclear why the reported proportions differ excessively and what percentage of people cannot form visual imagery. We investigated the replicability of the proportion of people with aphantasia using both criteria in the same population of participants. Therefore, we explored the potential causes of the discrepancy and characteristics of putative aphantasia in terms of multisensory imagery, cognitive style, and face recognition ability. 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). We found that 3.7 and 12.1% fulfilled the VVIQ and self-identification criteria, respectively, roughly replicating the proportions reported in previous studies. The self-identification criterion—but not the VVIQ criterion—contains items related to face recognition; hence, we suspected that face recognition ability was factor contributing to this discrepancy and conducted another online sampling study (Study 2: N = 774). We found a significant correlation between VVIQ and face recognition ability in the control group with self-identification, but not in the group defined by low VVIQ (VVIQ ≤32). As the participants in the control group with self-identification tended to exhibit moderately high VVIQ scores but low face recognition ability, we reason that the discrepancy can be partially explained by the contamination of individual differences in face recognition ability. Additional analyses of Study 1 revealed that the aphantasia group included participants who lacked all types of sensory imagery or only visual imagery in multisensory imagery and exhibited a non-specific cognitive style. This study indicates that the VVIQ alone may be insufficient to diagnose individuals who report an inability to form visual imagery. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of multiple assessments—along with the VVIQ—to better understand the diversity of imagery in aphantasia.
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spelling pubmed-104030652023-08-05 Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style Takahashi, Junichi Saito, Godai Omura, Kazufumi Yasunaga, Daichi Sugimura, Shinichiro Sakamoto, Shuichi Horikawa, Tomoyasu Gyoba, Jiro Front Psychol Psychology Aphantasia—a condition wherein individuals have a reduced or absent construction of voluntary visual imagery—is diagnosed using either the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) or self-identification. However, a significant discrepancy exists between the proportions of aphantasia in the populations assessed using these two criteria. It is unclear why the reported proportions differ excessively and what percentage of people cannot form visual imagery. We investigated the replicability of the proportion of people with aphantasia using both criteria in the same population of participants. Therefore, we explored the potential causes of the discrepancy and characteristics of putative aphantasia in terms of multisensory imagery, cognitive style, and face recognition ability. 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). We found that 3.7 and 12.1% fulfilled the VVIQ and self-identification criteria, respectively, roughly replicating the proportions reported in previous studies. The self-identification criterion—but not the VVIQ criterion—contains items related to face recognition; hence, we suspected that face recognition ability was factor contributing to this discrepancy and conducted another online sampling study (Study 2: N = 774). We found a significant correlation between VVIQ and face recognition ability in the control group with self-identification, but not in the group defined by low VVIQ (VVIQ ≤32). As the participants in the control group with self-identification tended to exhibit moderately high VVIQ scores but low face recognition ability, we reason that the discrepancy can be partially explained by the contamination of individual differences in face recognition ability. Additional analyses of Study 1 revealed that the aphantasia group included participants who lacked all types of sensory imagery or only visual imagery in multisensory imagery and exhibited a non-specific cognitive style. This study indicates that the VVIQ alone may be insufficient to diagnose individuals who report an inability to form visual imagery. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of multiple assessments—along with the VVIQ—to better understand the diversity of imagery in aphantasia. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-07-18 /pmc/articles/PMC10403065/ /pubmed/37546458 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1174873 Text en Copyright © 2023 Takahashi, Saito, Omura, Yasunaga, Sugimura, Sakamoto, Horikawa and Gyoba. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Takahashi, Junichi
Saito, Godai
Omura, Kazufumi
Yasunaga, Daichi
Sugimura, Shinichiro
Sakamoto, Shuichi
Horikawa, Tomoyasu
Gyoba, Jiro
Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style
title Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style
title_full Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style
title_fullStr Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style
title_full_unstemmed Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style
title_short Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style
title_sort diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10403065/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37546458
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1174873
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