Thanks! Super interesting!

Imagery

Very interesting. Could we know if infants have mental imager?

Thanks! This is exactly the idea! I’m trying to dissociate these stages by behavior, if possible.

There is a new theoretical neural model paper on this, osf.io/preprints/ps...

I’m also looking forward to reliable behavior measurement apart from introspection.

Agree, this is the point. From our experiment, individuals reporting NO imagery still have strong stimulus-specific visual activity www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

how about someone doing conceptual simulation without any imagery experience? This lead to the same change of pattern in the report and similar change in neural activity.

Cool. The approximate estimation of number doesn’t necessarily to be rendered as visual imagery, it could be conceptual and abstract. Thus collapse may reflect the quantity change but not the quality of imagery, right ?

Absolutely. I agree that the pattern of internal thought changes. I think the question is HOW to probe subjective report from behavior. The neuro imaging is another story.

This is an excellent example, which shows a well-defined way of introspection of rotating nuggets, by its N. The question is 1/this is again introspection, how objective and reliable it is? 2/is the task defining a “tracking aphantasia” instead of aphantasia of representing an imagined nugget?

Totally agree

Btw, we recently discussed the possibility of unconscious imagery with Chang et al. about recent neural findings
www.cell.com/current-biol...

we found that aph. have reduced confidence in visual perceptual tasks.
An important difference between aph. And blindsight is that aph. have ceiling effect in imagery task accuracy, while blindsight often «guess » just above chance.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

5/ However, how aphantasia impacts distinct aspects of attention (selective, sustained, shifting, etc.) and how these, in turn, interact with conscious experience remains an intriguing empirical question. The show will go on :)

4/ I love the idea that aphantasia is associated with shifting attention inward! I mentioned the shift between external and internal states of attention, or sensory vs. memory content, I should have been more clear on this.

3/ Deficits appears to be present in attentional template, stroop tasks and reduced P300 in oddball task, as recently found by Rebecca, Monzel and @andreablomkvist.bsky.social. Thus, it's task-dependent. Similar behaviour may also due to other strategy, especially when task is relatively easy.