My hypothesis is that if some people can actually experience imagined objects in the external environment, they should be able to perform smooth pursuit of an imagined moving object, thus measuring prophantasia.
There is no objective test of prophantasia, which currently relies on subjective reports. Critically, a visual stimulus is thought to be required for smooth pursuit - trying to track an imagined object will ultimately result in saccades (Spering & Montagnini, 2010).Įnter prophantasia - the ability to project imagined objects into the environment. Tracking a moving object, such as a ball being passed back and forth between two people, elicits a smooth pursuit - meaning, your eyes can follow the ball without making saccades throughout its trajectory. The jumps your eyes make are called saccades. If you take a video of your eye movements while looking around your environment, you will notice certain patterns - a fixation around an interesting object, followed by a quick jump to another location, where you will fixate for a moment or two, and then make the next jump. I am interested to test this effect in people with different imagery vividness, to determine whether there is a simple behavioral task that can identify aphantasia. A previous study (Cui et al., 2008) found that people are faster to respond to a word with a congruent background color, and this effect is correlated with imagery vividness (more vivid imagery = stronger congruency effect). Here you will be asked to identify color words that appear for 32 milliseconds, preceded briefly by a change in background color that may or may not correspond to the word. I am interested to test your ability to ignore background colors while performing a word identification task. The current task is an adapted version of the classic Stroop task, where you are tested on your ability to respond quickly to the word that is shown. The word therefore interferes with your ability to say the color of the font out loud. But because reading is such an automatic process, it is difficult to switch to saying the color of the font instead of reading the word. Even if the word RED is shown in blue font, it is easy to say the word aloud. The word can appear in a congruent font color or another color, and you are asked to either read the word aloud, or say the colour of the font. You may be familiar with the classic "Stroop" phenomenon, where you are presented with a rapid succession of color words (e.g., RED, GREEN, BLUE).
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