https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/
But you can also imagine tests based on introspection which are better than just straight up asking how vivid your mental imagery is.
For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless. It has no color because it’s just an abstract concept. For me it is a white outline on a black background, very vividly.
> For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
> For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless.
If you are not an aphantasiac, how do you know what meaning this question has for one? I am pretty sure aphantasiacs can "imagine" a triangle with some color in it. It is just that this imagine manifests differently than it does for you, but how can we measure that objectively?
To elaborate, even for an aphantasiac, a triangle or a color is not something abstract. You can draw it on a paper, and it is right there. If you close your eyes, you can remember what you have drawn on the paper, aphantasiac or not. So how exactly do you distinguish the quality of memories here? Certainly not with vague internet questionnaires. Research like that makes me really angry.
So without a proper way of defining things like "imagine" or "mental picture" first, tests like yours or like VVIQ are not well-defined. Now, maybe I don't understand the meaning of VVIQ because I have aphantasia. Or maybe I don't understand the meaning of VVIQ because I am a logician and mathematician, and I am very peculiar about "meaning". Maybe even both. Without a doubt though, VVIQ is not an objective test, because its elements are not properly defined.
> A triangle doesn't have to be filled with a color to be a triangle. Why would you imagine it with any color in it in the first place, not just a wireframe, being transparent inside?
That’s just it: when I imagine a triangle, it is a definite image with a definite color. The visual details like color come automatically for me. I cannot imagine it in the more abstract way you are describing. If it’s a wireframe, the wireframe is gray. It’s always a full, colorful, 3d scene, perhaps vague but definitely with visual detail.
This does not follow. I can imagine a red triangle without visualizing one.
What else has this triangle got? A flavor? A smell? A name? It would have never occurred to me it had a color in the first place before you asked.
This void is a 3D space. There is a general sense of up, down, left, right, front and back.
In this void I materialize a triangle. It is a wireframe. 3 lines, all the same length. No color, they are just lines.
By default the triangle is resting on one side, pointing up, and facing me. I can then rotate and move my mind "camera" around it while simultaneously rotating and moving the triangle as well.
The more complex the shapes, the more shapes, the harder it is to maintain coherency. I can close my eyes and concentrate to help.
I can assign colors if I wish to, but they are not really there visually. More like an extra information attached to the shape.
Consider a turing test of sorts: I want to convince you I am phantastic, you are tasked with determining whether I am faking it. Could such a test be realized?
Consider, for example, the “draw a bicycle” phenomenon. Many alleged phantists are wholly unable to correctly render a bicycle onto paper, and furthermore they are often unable to self-evaluate that their renders are bogus. Many aphants on the other hand have no issue depicting a well formed bicycle onto a paper, and furthermore would be able to identify faulty ones.
Of course this test does not have perfect recall/accuracy, it’s just an example of how the results can be counterintuitive.
As one, I don't draw, I construct. A set of rules make a bicycle a bicycle, so pick a part, draw it, then sequentially continue attaching parts per the rules, and at the end, it's a valid bicycle that functions. The resultant drawing is considered good, though I couldn't "see" any part of the bicycle before or while drawing.
This isn't from an image, but it is arguably a mapping.
Similarly, I've observed those who can mentally organize concepts but can't visualize pictures are often better able to render frameworks onto whiteboards than those who picture scenes.
It's made me wonder if the same parts of the mind are used for the one or the other, as if remembering everything visually uses up circuitry that could support semantic-space-time.
I happen to be fairly adept at wood working. And I often think up novel constructions that people quite fancy and indeed are willing to pay their hard earned bucks for.
Once I have thought these things up, I am able to render them to paper/CAD very easily for concrete plan creation. I am never surprised at the appearance of the thing when it is rendered to CAD, I always knew that’s what it would look like. I never saw it in any visual sense, but I knew exactly how it would appear, and I could answer in great detail any question someone might have about it (barring, perhaps, the sorts of questions that require trigonometry/excessive number crunching – the reason I’m putting it to CAD/paper).
To me, this means there isn’t a binary “has ‘imagination’/does not have ‘imagination’” divide. Rather, folks perhaps have different methods of “visualization”. Some folks have a “bitmap” approach (≈Photoshop). From the comments here, it seems some a “vector” approach (≈Illustrator). I would perhaps describe mine as a “CSG” approach (≈OpenSCAD/Grasshopper/etc.).
What’s nice with this phrasing is that nobody is missing anything. Nobody is a-trait. Everyone just has a different method of doing the same sorta thing, perhaps with some relative strengths and weaknesses accordingly, but no fundamental lack of ability to answer any particular question.
But who knows, maybe that’s just cope.
I confirm.
I would have probably picked up a color at random to play along with the whole “mind’s eye metaphor” before I realized people can actually “see” for real and it’s not a metaphor.
One method to possibly tell the difference is visual analogizing. Like, "picture" the Sydney Opera House, and then (without thinking in words) name some other objects it resembles. Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.
I don’t think we’ll ever get a test, because the entire concept of visualization and imagination is so unquantifiable and abstract. We’re all black boxes in a way to each other, with no real way of describing or showing each other how our version of this “visualization” or “image” or … looks or even feels.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbq8w/how-pupil-size-can-re...
If someone with normal mental visualization ability pictures a "bright" scene, the pupils contract just as they would in response to a bright visual stimulation. Aphants' pupils show no physical response to this test.
I have taken just such a test where spatial rotations, IIRC including multi-step ones, were a component, and I scored close to 99th percentile on every section except that one... where I scored 1st percentile. If that's not a strong sign of aphantasia I don't know what is!
I personally have aphantasia and have quite good spatial reasoning, including with mentally rotating objects. I think it's fair to assume that visualization and spatial reasoning are mostly (but not entirely) orthogonal spectra, and it's completely possible for people to fall anywhere on either, just based on how their brain developed its internal strategies throughout normal life.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26792259_Loss_of_im...
But:
1. "Imagine a table. There is a ball on the table. The ball rolls off the table onto the floor."
2. "From memory, what color was the ball? The table? The floor? What did you see under the table?"
Neither I nor any other, uh, aphants, that I have known have answers to those questions. Imagination still works, and answers to those questions can be produced interactively if handled appropriately, but, ex: we weren't imagining colors and we didn't see anything at all much less "under the table".
Alternative:
1. "What do you think people do, specifically, when they "count sheep" to go to sleep?"
Our answers to that should just be hilarious for you. Hi-larious.
Understand that we thought you folks "visualizing in your minds eye" were speaking metaphorically. Entirely metaphorically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland#Society_and_cultu...
"Mind's eye" and "visualization" refer to actual experiences. Those of us with aphantasia (no exceptions that I've encountered so far) did not realize these words referred to actual experiences.
People without aphantasia literally count sheep to go to sleep.
There are less generous interpretations.
If you are actually drawing on a larger amount of data, specifically pertaining to the mechanisms of people's internal experiences, that'd be useful to know. If you are not, I'd gently suggest that you're working from a flawed statistical assumption, and that looking at the numerous interactions in this thread where people describe materially different internal experiences ("I can only recall tastes in terms of descriptors" - "I can experience a taste by imagining it"[0]) may be more informative without presuming universal consistency.