Simulation in the ‘Blind’ mind: Examining unconscious mental imagery in aphantasia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aphantasia is the absence of conscious mental imagery, but it is unclear to what extent aphantasia also implicates unconscious mental imagery. Embodied theories of concept knowledge propose that word meaning involves simulation of sensory and motor experiences; thus, examining simulation can refine our understanding of imagery deficits in aphantasia and clarify whether simulation shares mechanisms with conscious and/or unconscious mental imagery. In the present study we examined whether individuals with aphantasia show sensorimotor simulation effects during language processing. We recruited 104 aphantasics and 104 age-, gender-, and education-matched controls who completed two semantic processing tasks, a parity judgement task, and a series of mental imagery questionnaires. We observed simulation effects (i.e., faster responses to words associated with more sensorimotor experience) with both aphantasia and control participants. Our results suggest that simulation during semantic processing can occur in the absence of conscious mental imagery. The findings show that unconscious mental imagery, by way of simulation, may be preserved in aphantasia. The findings also limit the extent to which conscious mental imagery and sensorimotor simulation are likely to share underlying mechanisms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".