Megla Emma, Prasad Deepasri, Bainbridge Wilma A
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.
bioRxiv. 2024 Sep 26:2024.09.23.614521. doi: 10.1101/2024.09.23.614521.
Aphantasia is a condition characterized by reduced voluntary mental imagery. As this lack of mental imagery disrupts visual memory, understanding the nature of this condition can provide important insight into memory, perception, and imagery. Here, we leveraged the power of case studies to better characterize this condition by running a pair of identical twins, one with aphantasia and one without, through mental imagery tasks in an fMRI scanner. We identified objective, neural measures of aphantasia, finding less visual information in their memories which may be due to lower connectivity between frontoparietal and occipitotemporal lobes of the brain. However, despite this difference, we surprisingly found more visual information in the aphantasic twin's memory than anticipated, suggesting that aphantasia is a spectrum rather than a discrete condition.
无想象能力是一种以自愿性心理意象减少为特征的状况。由于这种心理意象的缺乏会扰乱视觉记忆，了解这种状况的本质可以为记忆、感知和意象提供重要的见解。在此，我们利用案例研究的力量，通过让一对同卵双胞胎（一个有无想象能力，一个没有）在功能磁共振成像扫描仪中完成心理意象任务，来更好地描述这种状况。我们确定了无想象能力的客观神经测量指标，发现他们记忆中的视觉信息较少，这可能是由于大脑额顶叶和枕颞叶之间的连接性较低。然而，尽管存在这种差异，我们令人惊讶地发现，无想象能力的双胞胎记忆中的视觉信息比预期的更多，这表明无想象能力是一个连续体而非离散状况。
