Research Project
Full description Most people report that they experience images in their mind's eye. However, there are marked individual differences, with some people reporting that they are unable to construct mental images at all (aphantasics), and others reporting imagined experiences that are as realistic as seeing (hyperphantasics). The vividness of imagined images is most often measured via subjective self-report. Chang and Pearson (2018), however, have suggested that a binocular rivalry protocol can be used as an objective measure. They found that subjective ratings of the vividness of pre-imagined experiences during the experiment were related to the strength of priming in an objective probe detection task. Moreover, the extent of priming was associated with individual differences in the reported vividness of their typical imagined experiences. We wanted to assess this type of effect using an improved paradigm and a relatively large sample (N=80) of the general population. We found that people more often reported perceptual dominance of pre-imagined inputs, and detected more probes embedded within these inputs. However, these effects did not correlate with the typical ratings people used to describe the vividness of their imagined experiences. Priming effects were greater on trials when participants reported that their pre-imagined experience had been relatively vivid, but these ratings were delivered after probe detection attempts, so performance on the objective detection task could have biased the subjective vividness ratings. Overall, we argue that there is currently no strong evidence that pre-imagining inputs during binocular rivalry can provide an objective measure that indexes the vividness of different people's imagined sensations.