New Paper Out: Large-Scale Aphantasia Study!

Dr. Bainbridge and her collaborators Zoë Pounder, Dr. Alison Eardley, and Dr. Chris Baker have a new paper out in Cortex entitled “Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory” (link to the pre-proof version)! This is one of the largest-scale studies on aphantasia, the inability to form voluntary visual imagery. In this study, 61 aphantasiacs and matched controls with typical imagery studied real-world scene images and were asked to draw them from memory; later, they copied the scene images during a matched perceptual condition. Participants with aphantasia recalled significantly fewer objects with an increased reliance on verbal scaffolding but they had high spatial accuracy, equivalent to the control group. This experiment not only provides evidence for separate object versus spatial information memory systems but also provides important validation for the existence of aphantasia.