sampendu.bsky.social
Sam Schwarzkopf
@sampendu.bsky.social
1.7K followers 1K following 640 posts
Kiwified neuroscientist & perception researcher at the School of Optometry & Vision Science at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Lab website: sampendu.net #UltimaDragon
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sampendu.bsky.social
Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg:
#psychskysci #neuroscience

doi.org/10.1101/2025...
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sampendu.bsky.social
Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 1d
Some of these could still be from self-fulfilling prophecies (if you think your imagery is 0 in vividness then perhaps you don't bother in other questions) but at least some of these results speak against that (like the dream questions or the spontaneous contents of people's imagery).
sampendu.bsky.social
Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 1d
Yes this is at the core of my interest in this. Right now these vividness questions are too open-ended. In future work we want to devise ways to titrate this better relative to other experiences. But the interesting thing in our present results is how much even these vague questions relate to.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 2d
Brains contain neurons. It doesn't contain images*. Neither does the JPG on your computer hard drive (Not that I am a big fan of software allegories but it works in this case).

(* Technically, the only exception is the retina which is arguably part of the brain but it "contains" an actual image.)
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 2d
Depends on what you call "exists" or "image". Strictly speaking, the brain doesn't contain images of any kind and that is independent of the mental imagery debate. But that's also missing the point of this debate.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
But here is the funny thing: it's not like I cannot do that. I just do it inside my head (or rather somewhere else outside my head). I don't "see" a plane zooming through the church but in my mind I know exactly what that looks like. Is that the same thing? I still don't really know... 🤷‍♂️
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sampendu.bsky.social
Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
The more I learn about this the more I think that talking about aphants like it affects all senses equally in everyone is part of the problem. Our study was specifically about vision but I think people range widely in their inner senses.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
Well it's confounded by lots of things, such as whether you actually remember dreaming. But I met people who say they dream, but not visually.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
Doesn't matter what you call it but it's logically fallacious.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
Now you're adding in reverse inference (which remains popular as ever in cognitive neuroscience...) 😉
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
This is exactly the problem inherent with so much #mentalimagery research: without any objective external reference to validate this, it is no better (& most likely worse...) than simply asking people how clear & detailed their imagery is. Because it is literally the same question in disguise.
lin-rui-ipwt.bsky.social
Lin @lin-rui-ipwt.bsky.social · Jul 24
Aphantasics often report N=0 or 1, Hyperphantasics can go 10+. This correlates with VVIQ, but N is an actual performance metric, not a feeling.

Bonus: As you do this, you might feel the urge to "pick up" and "eat" one of the nuggets. You might even "taste" it.

That's it. That's the whole point.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
Depends on how you define it. Like with #aphantasia I'd say we need a much stricter definition. Based on that I don't think there were any hyperaphantasics in our study although that's hard to say as we would need better tests for that. But based on conventional definitions (VVIQ): yes.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
But your nugget test simply replaces one kind of subjective self-report with another. It isn't addressing the epistemological problem. Your test cannot be validated. But more importantly, even if we -could- validate it, we wouldn't know if that measures people's capacity for imagery.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
You are falling into the same epistemological trap so much of this research has been stuck in. We aren't at the point of using stop watch. We don't even know if people are running or cycling or swimming or if anyone is moving anywhere at all. You can't do quantitative science on this without that.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 3d
No. As we argue in the paper this is exactly -not- the case. The VVIQ is surprisingly useful and I say this as a long time critic of this test. Perhaps it just correlates with a lot of self-reports of things people think happen inside their minds - but even if that's the case this is important...
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Lin @lin-rui-ipwt.bsky.social · 5d
This merely indicates that VVIQ is worthless— I suggested to consider the Rotating Chicken Nugget Test
lin-rui-ipwt.bsky.social
Lin @lin-rui-ipwt.bsky.social · Jul 24
The debate around imagery vividness (VVIQ) is stuck. We're using thermometers to measure GPU clocks.

Why? We're confusing attentional tracking (slow, costly) with parallel mental rendering (the truth of imagination's bandwidth).

#IPWT #CognitiveScience #Aphantasia
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
(* whatever 'literal' means we aren't sure about either - it continues to cause debate 😏)
sampendu.bsky.social
Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
Yes definitely. In fact I know someone who says they only imagine touch. The self-categorising question where the apple is in front of the head could in theory be interpreted as "feeling" the apple in front of the head but not seeing anything. We didn't go into the non-visual aspects at all so far.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
Well I think that depends :
For someone who sees it before them, they could presumably follow their mental lines? I wouldn't know because for me, I just draw what it looks like in my head. But for an aphant I know, they don't do it. They can only copy what they can see with their eyes.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
For me dreams (and hypgnagia and Tetris hallucinations etc) are definitely "seen" whereas mental imagery is not. Probably not the same for everyone though. Many people don't see their dreams apparently...
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
But either way, what you describe sounds a lot like seeing -something- to me. For me the choices on C and D are always unambigously the left one (black only).
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
The question is about taking the best match. There is never going to be a perfect exemplar but you need to start somewhere. Interestingly in Exp 1 hardly anyone chose the greyscale apple which may be telling (but less clear in Exp 2).
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
The problem is that we don't really have the language for this. But as we say in discussion, we'd like to go to experiments where we try to calibrate the experience relative to other experiences like dreams, afterimages, etc. I think this might help disambiguate this more.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
🤯
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
Yes there is always a risk of semantic confusion that will be hard (impossible?) to control completely. But as you say we went to great lengths to be explicit. In one question (not shown on figure unfortunately) we actually explicitly asked about whether they experience images "floating" before them
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
I'm not saying the beach cartoon alone is sufficient (as we did in Exp 2). Rather we should probably combine it with some other diverse questions, perhaps a few VVIQ items, different cartoon questions, & more general questions such as whether people visualise fiction or daily imagery use.
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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d
Just one more point: we also found that our beach cartoon question correlated strongly with VVIQ2 scores. In fact, this correlation is stronger than most VVIQ items correlate with each other. Combined with how tedious & repetitive the VVIQ is, I believe it's high time we put that instrument to rest
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