Bainbridge Wilma A, Pounder Zoë, Eardley Alison F, Baker Chris I
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Westminster, London, UK.
Cortex. 2021 Feb;135:159-172. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.014. Epub 2020 Dec 3.
Congenital aphantasia is a recently characterized variation of experience defined by the inability to form voluntary visual imagery, in individuals who are otherwise high performing. Because of this specific deficit to visual imagery, individuals with aphantasia serve as an ideal group for probing the nature of representations in visual memory, particularly the interplay of object, spatial, and symbolic information. Here, we conducted a large-scale online study of aphantasia and revealed a dissociation in object and spatial content in their memory representations. Sixty-one individuals with aphantasia and matched controls with typical imagery studied real-world scene images, and were asked to draw them from memory, and then later copy them during a matched perceptual condition. Drawings were objectively quantified by 2,795 online scorers for object and spatial details. Aphantasic participants recalled significantly fewer objects than controls, with less color in their drawings, and an increased reliance on verbal scaffolding. However, aphantasic participants showed high spatial accuracy equivalent to controls, and made significantly fewer memory errors. These differences between groups only manifested during recall, with no differences between groups during the matched perceptual condition. This object-specific memory impairment in individuals with aphantasia provides evidence for separate systems in memory that support object versus spatial information. The study also provides an important experimental validation for the existence of aphantasia as a variation in human imagery experience.
先天性phantasia是一种最近被描述的体验变异,其定义为在其他方面表现出色的个体中无法形成自愿的视觉意象。由于这种视觉意象的特定缺陷,患有phantasia的个体成为探究视觉记忆中表征本质的理想群体,特别是物体、空间和符号信息之间的相互作用。在这里,我们对phantasia进行了一项大规模的在线研究,揭示了他们记忆表征中物体和空间内容的分离。61名患有phantasia的个体以及匹配的具有典型意象的对照组研究了真实世界场景图像,并被要求凭记忆绘制这些图像,随后在匹配的感知条件下进行临摹。绘图由2795名在线评分者对物体和空间细节进行客观量化。患有phantasia的参与者回忆起的物体明显少于对照组,他们的绘图中颜色较少,且对语言支撑的依赖增加。然而,患有phantasia的参与者表现出与对照组相当的高空间准确性,并且记忆错误明显更少。这些组间差异仅在回忆过程中表现出来,在匹配的感知条件下组间没有差异。患有phantasia的个体中这种特定于物体的记忆损害为记忆中支持物体与空间信息的不同系统提供了证据。该研究还为phantasia作为人类意象体验变异的存在提供了重要的实验验证。