![]() ![]() While people with aphantasia lack visual imagery, they appear to have intact spatial memory, which is distinct from imagery and may be stored differently, according to Bainbridge. For example, some wrote the word “window” inside an outline of a window rather than drawing the windowpanes. Individuals with aphantasia had a harder time-they could place a few objects in the room, but their drawings were often simpler, and relied at times on written descriptions. The differences in the memory experiment were striking: Individuals with typical imagery usually drew the most salient objects in the room with a moderate amount of detail, like color and key design elements (a green carpet, rather than a rectangle). ![]() They then asked the participants in both groups to draw the rooms, once from memory and once while looking at the photo as a reference. The goal was to better characterize aphantasia, which is little-studied, and tease apart differences between object and spatial memory.įor the study, published in the journal Cortex, Bainbridge and colleagues showed photographs of three rooms to dozens of individuals with both typical and limited imagery. “They thought it was merely an expression, and had never realized until adulthood that other people could actually visualize sheep without seeing them.”īainbridge, who is an expert on the neuroscience of perception and memory, decided to experimentally quantify the differences between aphantasic individuals and those with typical imagery on a specific set of visual memory tasks. “Some individuals with aphantasia have reported that they don’t understand what it means to ‘count sheep’ before going to bed,” said Wilma Bainbridge, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who recently led a study of the condition, which can be congenital or acquired through trauma. These individuals have a rare condition called aphantasia, which prevents them from easily recreating images in their mind’s eye-in fact, the phrase “mind’s eye” may be meaningless to them. If you were asked to draw a picture of your grandparents’ living room from memory, could you do it? For most people, certain details are easy to visualize: “There’s a piano in the corner, a palm by the window and two seashells on the coffee table.”īut for others, such a task would be almost impossible. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |