BROASA-8v1.pdf — page 4

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Lajos Brons
Vol. 28
diﬀerent ways. Most obviously, the term “reduced” immediately raises the question:
Reduced to what extent (or by how much)? Furthermore, the phrase “reduced or
absent” also suggests continuity between weak (or “low”) imagers and non-imagers
and it is presently unknown whether there is such a continuity. Although it is intu-
itively plausible that absence of imagery is the low extreme on a scale ranging from no
imagery to extremely vivid imagery (as reported by hyperphantasics), it might turn
out to be the case that non-imagers are not just very weak imagers but that there is
a qualitative diﬀerence between having (very) weak imagery abilities and having no
such abilities whatsoever.
Secondly, voluntary imagery contrasts with involuntary imagery, which comes in
two very diﬀerent kinds: involuntary ﬂashes of imagery during wakefulness, and im-
agery in dreams. Given the role of imagery in autobiographic memory (e.g. Greenberg
& Knowlton 2014), one would expect signiﬁcant diﬀerences in memory between some-
one who experiences no involuntary imagery at all or only in dreams, and someone
who experiences ﬂashes of imagery related to previous experiences during wakefulness.
(The occurrence of imagery in dreams also raises the question whether, when, and to
what extent other kinds of sub- and/or unconscious imagery occurs in aphantasics.
See also sections 4 and 6.)
Thirdly, as mentioned above, only about half of the respondents in the initial
study reported lacking imagery in all sense modalities. This, of course, raises the
question: How many and which kinds of imagery must be aﬀected for the “aphan-
tasia” label to apply?
What complicates this is the number of diﬀerent kinds of
imagery, opacity in introspection, and the possibility of overlap. A list of kinds of
imagery does not coincide with a list of sense modalities. There is no single faculty
of visual imagery, for example. Instead, there are (at least) two distinct kinds of
visual imagery—object imagery and spatial imagery—and these two play diﬀerent
roles (Kosslyn 1994). And some kinds of imagery—such as motor imagery—do not
seem to be associated with particular sense modalities at all. (The other way around,
while there is a sense of balance, I doubt there is imagery of balance.) It may be the
case that in imagining shapes, a lack of object imagery can be compensated (at least
partially) with spatial imagery and/or motor imagery. If there are such compensation
eﬀects and other interactions and overlaps between diﬀerent kinds of imagery, it may
be hard to keep them apart in introspection, but also in psychological tests (if those
are insuﬃciently carefully designed). Furthermore, some kinds of imagery (such as
spatial and motor imagery) may present themselves in a form that is less likely to be
recognized as imagery, which further diminishes the reliability of introspection.
These considerations suggest that the least ambiguous variety of aphantasia is
a condition of completely lacking voluntary imagery of any kind and lacking invol-
untary (ﬂashes of) imagery during wakefulness. Nicholas Watkins (2018) calls this
“total aphantasia”. However, the above considerations also suggest that introspec-
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