Aphantasic Drawing Dataset

This dataset contains data from an online memory drawing experiment conducted with individuals with aphantasia and normal imagery.

Dataset Description

This dataset comes from the Brain Bridge Lab from the University of Chicago. It is from an online memory drawing experiment with 61 individuals with aphantasia and 52 individuals with normal imagery. In the experiment participants 1) studied 3 separate scene photographs presented one after the other 2) drew them from memory, 3) completed a recognition task 4) copied the images while viewing them 5) filled out a VVIQ and OSIQ questionnaire and also demographics questions. The scenes the participants were asked to draw were of a kitchen, bedroom, and living room. The control (normal imagery) and treatment group (aphantasia) were determined by VVIQ scores. Those with a score >=40 were control and those with scores <=25 were in the aphantasia group. For more info on the experiment and design follow the paper linked below. The original repository for the data from the experiment was made available on the OSF website linked below. It was created July 31, 2020 and last updated September 27, 2023.

Curated by: Wilma Bainbridge, Zoe Pounder, Alison Eardley, Chris Baker

Dataset Sources

Original Repository: https://osf.io/cahyd/
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.014

Dataset Structure

Example of the structure of the data:

{
  "subject_id": 111,
  "treatment": "aphantasia",
  "demographics": {
    "country": "United States",
    "age": 56,
    "gender": "male",
    "occupation": "sales/music",
    "art_ability": 3,
    "art_experience": "None",
    "device": "desktop",
    "input": "mouse",
    "difficult": "memorydrawing",
    "diff_explanation": "drawing i have little patience for i can do it but i will spend hours editing (never got the hang of digital drawing on screens",
    "vviq_score": 16,
    "osiq_score": 61
  },
  "drawings": {
    "kitchen": {
      "perception": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
      "memory": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>
    },
    "livingroom": {
      "perception": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
      "memory": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>
    },
    "bedroom": {
      "perception": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
      "memory": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>
    }
  },
  "image": {
    "kitchen": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
    "livingroom": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
    "bedroom": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>
  }
}

Data Fields

subject_id: Subject ID
treatment: group for the experiment based on VVIQ score; "aphantasia"(VVIQ<=25) or "control"(VVIQ>=40)
country: Participants Country
age: Age
gender: Gender
occupation: Occupation
art_ability: Self-Report rating of art ability from 1-5
art_experience: Description of participant's art experience
device: Device used for the experiment (desktop or laptop)
input: What participant used to draw (mouse, trackpad, etc.)
difficult: Part of the experiment participant though was most challenging
diff_explanation: Explanation of why they thought the part specified in "difficult" was hard
vviq_score: VVIQ test total points (16 questions from 0-5)
osiq_score: OSIQ test total points (30 questions from 0-5)
perception drawings: Participant drawings of kitchen, living room, and bedroom from perception part of experiment
memory drawings: Participant drawings of kitchen, living room, and bedroom from memory part of experiment
image: Actual images (stimuli) participants had to draw (kitchen, living room, bedroom)

Dataset Creation

Source Data

The orignal repository for the data included a folder for the participant's drawings (1 for aphantasia and 1 for control), a folder of the scene images they had to draw (stimuli), and a excel file with the demographic survey and test score data. The excel file had 117 rows and the 2 folders for aphantasia and control had 115 subject folders total. Subject 168 did not fill out the demographic information or take the VVIQ and OSIQ test and subjects 160, 161, and 162 did not have any drawings. 160, 161, and 162 were removed during the data cleaning process and the final parquet file has 115 participants.

Data Collection and Processing

The original excel file did not have total score for the VVIQ and OSIQ tests, but instead individual points for each questions. The total score was calculated from these numbers. The orignal drawing folders for each participant had typically 18 files. There were 6 files of interest: The 3 drawings from the memory part of the experiment, and the 3 drawings from the perception part of the experiment. They had file names that were easy to distinguish:

For memory: sub{subid}-mem{1,2,or 3}-{room}.png where the room was either livingroom, bedroom, or kitchen and 1,2, or 3 depending on the order in which the participant did the drawings.

For perception: sub{subid}-pic{1,2,or 3}-{room}.png These files were matched with the excel file rows by subject ID, so each participant typically had 6 drawings total. Some of the drawings were blank white images or had a question mark drawn indicating the participant could not recall the image. These images were removed. The actual image folder had 3 images (kitchen, living room, bedroom) that were replicated to go with each of the 115 participants. The final format of the data is shown above.

For a look at the code used to process the data follow this google colab link:

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1Oz1QL0mD9g3lVBgtmqHa-QiwwIJ2JaX5?usp=drive_link

Example Analysis

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1FFnVkaw-jr3ygEGDK41YyAyKlqvTDvkg?usp=sharing

Data Producers

The contributors of the original dataset and authors of the paper are:

Wilma Bainbridge (University of Chicago Department of Psychology & Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA),
Zoë Pounder (Department of Psychology, University of Westminster, London, UK)
Alison Eardley (Department of Psychology, University of Westminster, London, UK)
Chris Baker (Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA)

Citation

BibTeX:

@misc{Bainbridge_Pounder_Eardley_Baker_2023, title={Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory}, url={osf.io/cahyd}, publisher={OSF}, author={Bainbridge, Wilma A and Pounder, Zoë and Eardley, Alison and Baker, Chris I}, year={2023}, month={Sep} }

APA:

Bainbridge, W. A., Pounder, Z., Eardley, A., & Baker, C. I. (2023, September 27). Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory. Retrieved from osf.io/cahyd

Glossary

Aphantasia: The inability to create visual imagery, keeping you from visualizing things in your mind.