Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Guido Sebastián Lax | email: laxguido@gmail.com
Guido S. Lax 1°, Alejandro Vische 1°, Pablo M. Gleiser 2°3°, Cecilia Forcato 1°3°, Francisco T. Gallo 1°3°
1° Laboratorio de Sueño y Memoria, Departamento de Ciencias de la vida, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA)
2° Laboratorio de Neurociencia de Sistemas Complejos, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA).
3° Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
Visual imagery is a form of sensory imagination similar to perception, except it occurs in the absence of a corresponding external stimulus. Recent studies have shown that some people lack the ability to produce mental images voluntarily, a condition known as “aphantasia”. The opposite case, vivid photo-like mental images, is known as hyperphantasia. The study of mental imagery is hampered by its private and subjective nature; the most commonly used questionnaire is the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), which allows us to estimate the vividness of mental images based on a self-report. The aim of our research is to develop a novel method to investigate visual imagery through a guided visualization exercise. Aphantasics and hyperphantasics completed a guided auditory visualization task and afterwards answered several questionnaires to evaluate their performance, the quality of the experience and their episodic memory of the exercise. Here we present the preliminary results of the study.