Visual Imagery and Episodic Memory: Comparing Aphantasics, Typical Imagers and Hyperphantasics across word and video tasks

Overview This study investigates whether individual differences in visual imagery vividness are associated with differences in episodic memory performance across visual and verbal domains. Specifically, it compares participants with Aphantasia, Typical imagery, and Hyperphantasia on (a) a video-based visual memory task and (b) a word free recall task manipulating word imageability. Hypotheses Hypothesis 1 : a)Participants will recall more high-imageable than low-imageable words b) This imageability effect will be weakest in Aphantasics and strongest in Hyperphantasics Hypothesis 2 : The will not be a significant difference between Aphantasics and Hyperaphanasics for non-imageable word memory. Hypothesis 3 : Aphantasics will show lower accuracy than Hyperphantasic imagers on videobased visual memory tasks (Exploratory)Hypothesis 4 : Group differences in memory performance will be larger for the video-based memory task than for the word-recall task. Analysis SPSS will be used to clean and analyse our data. A 3x2 mixed ANOVA will be used to analyse data from the word recall experiment to see if imageability effects free recall across Aphantasics, typical imagers and hyperphantasics. If significant it will be followed up with simple effects A One-way ANOVA will be used to analyse the data from the percentage of correct responses following viewing a video scene. The Yes/No filler questions (as a distractor task) will be correlated with VVIQ scores using Pearson’s correlation. Exploraly, we may also run a 3 (group) × 2 (task modality: word vs video) mixed ANOVA on standardised scores to compare group effects across modalities. For all ANOVAS normality of residuals ad homogeneity of variance will use Levene’s.