sampendu.bsky.social
Kiwified neuroscientist & perception researcher at the School of Optometry & Vision Science at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Lab website: sampendu.net
#UltimaDragon
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Yeah, altho perhaps the same issue applies? From what I gather projectors often seem to project self-contained objects like apples or sofas or really boring things like oriented Gabor patches... That said, in our survey some people also report projecting complex scenes & daydreams.
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The way I conceived it, projector/associator/prophantasia axis is the same as sensory qualia. At least I described the projector experience as being in the visual field & Figueroa defined it similarly I believe. For me at least the "behind the head" feeling just distinguishes it from "real seeing"
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On the other hand, I think the retinal afterimage of the colour-inverted apple is really misleading. If projectors exist (& you seem to have doubts about this?) then this probably approximates their imagery experience, but it most certainly does not match how I visualise at all.
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I just came across this (because I clearly don't have a gazillion more important things to do right now...? 🫠): aphantasia.com/guide/
I like their version of the apple cartoon (because it appears behind the head like it does for me 😏) & really like the ball on the table test.
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Impossible to say, but it seems likely for several reasons. Not least of which the fact it is posted on what appears to be his OSF account. And it was according to this Reddit it was also posted on his website - but curiously it has disappeared from there...
www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia...
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Yes it could be a mish-mash. The reference list certainly is.
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This is a clever idea! Although one might argue that imagining not-seeing is much harder than imagining seeing something on top of what you're seeing? People generally find it easier to imagine with closed eyes (although I've had some comments that some apparently find it easier with eyes open!)
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I have posted a comment on PubPeer which may alert them to this. As for commenting here, this is science Blue Sky & it's the place were researchers discuss research. You are free not to follow these comments. Have a nice day.
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There you go. Much more credible than this preprint... 😏
(Also: We are all doomed...)
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I mean, even GPT is surely unlikely to generate results that are so implausible as this. Similarly, nobody would be foolish enough to -fake- data like this either. Which really only leaves coding errors or mislabelled data. The figures are clearly from Excel and that's a perfect recipe for errors.
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We may already be mostly there. I gave GPT a vague general description that relates to my past research and it returned the citation to one of my papers, with correct DOI and everything.
Which puzzles me even more why such confabulated bibliographies would still appear in this preprint...
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Yeah I spotted that too yesterday. But that is about the references really. The text doesn't read like it's GPT generated - it lacks the bland eloquence & takes things too personal in places. And those data figures don't strike me as the work of an AI either to be honest. All in all, it's bizarre.
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I just noticed that the hyperlink to the Ezzati paper - which also directs to a completely different paper - is in fact this:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37900611/?ut...
Seems to imply GPT was used to search for literature?
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Yes, strange isn't it? 😐
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Yes - seen this before as well (& I also usually spot them because they cite papers by me that I never wrote...😏). Never seen anything like this in a preprint from an emeritus professor though.
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My expectation would be that this is too bizarre to be worse. But then again, in the age we live in I am beginning to realise nothing is too bizarre anymore...
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You're right! And I now feel shame that I read over this & didn't notice it at the time... 🤪
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Oh and this one takes me to a different paper by the same first author:
Monzel, M., Feist, K., & Zeman, A. (2022). Visual imagery and memory: Aphantasia impairs both visual and verbal long-term memory. Journal of Neuropsychology, 16(1), 84–101.
I think I have spent enough time on this today... 🤷♀️
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Ah and this one has an incorrect DOI taking me to a different study:
Thakral, P. P., Benoit, R. G., & Schacter, D. L. (2017). Characterizing the role of the hippocampus during episodic simulation and encoding. Hippocampus, 27(6), 577–587
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Which one? I can't say I have looked that deeply at it yet. I did click on the link to a preprint in the bibliography which is a broken link.
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Even the (presumably) more correct values in the reanalysis seem implausibly high, considering it is considerably stronger than what I believe is the typical correlation between body height & weight.
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Relates to long-standing issue in #neuroskyence & #psychscisky. No brain-behaviour link can plausibly be this strong. But especially not a fickle self-report like VVIQ where people change their response based on their mood & learning about how others respond to the same questions...
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Here my attempt to reproduce results in Fig 4. The data aren't public but I managed to extract the data values from that figure reasonably well I think. As one might expect from this amount of scatter, the R^2 here is below 50% rather than the 91% reported. Curious to know what happened here... 🤨
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But even the subjective Perky designs don't work for me at all. I thought I imagined real gratings in the noise a few times & got really excited - only to realise I was looking at catch trials 😉
If we're right about this prophantasia/projector business, then that's because I just don't project.
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Interesting! I have a student trialing this just now - that is, an ambiguous figure version of the binocular rivalry priming task (not sure if this is what you're referring to). I'd actually like to attempt a direct replication of BR priming but it's not trivial to do this well.
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Yes it's reassuring me too to hear that I'm not alone with these confusions... 😀
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There is a widespread assumption that being a projector means to have really strong imagery, but from we can tell so far (which admittedly is not much) that isn't the case at all. But what people call vividness does seem to correlate with all manner of things - presumably it reflects -something-?
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To me this seems like the most objective aspect I can make this (which is not to claim it is objective). I can distinguish the visual experience of dreams & Tetris images from how I experience mental images. I -see- the former but not the latter.
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What do you mean by it "feels seen"? This is the part where I always get stuck (& why I am beginning to believe that some people are apparently projectors...). My mental images don't "feel seen" even though they are definitely pictures. OTOH, dreams, Tetris effect, afterimages etc feel seen.
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Regarding unique art, if it helps, there is a long-standing debate on how possible it is to create anything unique that isn't derivative of something of the thousands of years of human art history. So I wouldn't be too worried about that part 😉
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I think the one thing that springs out of all of this for me is that we don't actually know how to define aphantasia at present. The tools for that are currently inadequate. But we are working on it... 🙂
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And just to reiterate my earlier arguments, vividness ratings cannot distinguish between projectors & non-proj. If you project, but only faintly (as I suspect most projectors would), you'd say that's a low vividness image. If you don't project, you'll instead rate your internal image.
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More ironically, Adam Zeman et al's bastardisation of VVIQ is what led Nadine Dijkstra to conclude that the VVIQ inherently asks for -projected- images, while Zeman himself seems to consider mental images inside the mind and projection only something that extreme hyperphants have. What a mess! 😜
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Yes massive ironies in this. I don't "see" any elephant on that picture. But I most certainly would have a mental image of an elephant that has all manner of detail automatically filled in. If I am to believe Reddit, people like me are aphantasics. If I believe Zeman or Della Sala, I am hyperphant.
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You're not the first person I know of for whom this is the case. It's not something this survey is meant to capture so I'd just answer it by the best description of your visual and/or depictive experience. But this other sensory form of how some people imagine is definitely worth further study!
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Next you're gonna tell me it's not some creepy demon living in my computer... 😉
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Now I know what to say next time someone tells me research on mental imagery has no practical value... 😁
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The whole thing is quite fascinating. We clearly think "that car is huge" but then in the task people clearly try to judge the retinal/screen size (and get it wrong). Why? No experiment I know of explicitly prompts people to judge retinal size. Is it natural to do that cause it's on a flat screen?
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🤣
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(And the answer to that question may well be whether or not we are all talking about the same thing in different words... I believe we aren't but I think I'll take that nagging doubt to my grave)
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Of course this brings us back to @sulfaro.bsky.social illustration of what imagery is like (for Alex). It's that black image with arrows towards a elephant's trunk & ears etc where there is only a black image (for Sam). I still haven't understood if I agree & understand that illustration or not 🤔
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That idea sort of sounds to me (ignorant non-projector) as if people hallucinate occluded objects to be there in front of them. This sounds like it should interfere rather than help? Do hyperphantasic prophantasics see all those superimposed things without knowing what is in front of what? 🙂
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I mean I don't see them as complete either. Because they are partially occluded. But I obviously know where they are and have an idea what they look like (and would be surprised if they end up looking different). Why would you project that though?