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Aphantasia
Aphantasia ( , ) is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images. The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880, but has remained relatively unstudied. Interest in the phenomenon renewed after the publication of a study in 2015 conducted by a team led by Adam Zeman (neurologist), Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter. Zeman's team coined the term ''aphantasia'', derived from the ancient Greek word (), which means "appearance/image", and the prefix (), which means "without". People with aphantasia are called ''aphantasics'', or less commonly ''aphants'' or ''aphantasiacs''. Aphantasia can be considered the opposite of hyperphantasia, the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery. History The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880 in a Statistical survey, statistical study about mental imagery. Galton wrote: In 1897, Théodule-Armand Ribot reported a kind of "typographic visual type" imagination, consisting in mentally se ...
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Adam Zeman (neurologist)
Adam Zbynek James Zeman (born September 1957) is a British neurologist, who coined the term "aphantasia" for an inability to create mental images. Biography Zeman is the son of Czech-born historian Zbyněk Zeman. He was educated at Westminster School, then at Magdalen College and Merton College, Oxford, where he took a first degree in philosophy and psychology then trained in medicine. He trained in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, London, and Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. He completed a doctorate at Oxford in 1994. He was appointed a lecturer at University College London in 1990, was a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh from 1996 to 2005, and has been Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology at the Peninsula Medical School (now the University of Exeter Medical School) since 2005. He is lead clinician of the Sleep Centre at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. He was Chairman of the British Neuropsychiatry Associatio ...
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Hyperphantasia
Hyperphantasia is the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery. It is the opposite condition to aphantasia, where mental visual imagery is not present. The experience of hyperphantasia is more common than aphantasia and has been described as being "as vivid as real seeing". Hyperphantasia constitutes all five senses within vivid mental imagery, although literature on the subject is dominated by "visual" mental imagery research, with a lack of research on the other four senses. Research into hyperphantasia is most commonly completed by self-report questionnaires, such as the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), developed by David Marks in 1973, which evaluates the vividness of an individual's mental imagery out of a score of 80. Individuals scoring from 75 to 80 are deemed hyperphantasics and are estimated to constitute around 2.5% of the population. Mechanism There is no reliably specific mental imagery cortical network; the formation of mental imagery i ...
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Vividness Of Visual Imagery Questionnaire
The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) was developed in 1973 by the British psychologist David Marks (psychologist), David Marks. The VVIQ consists of 16 items in four groups of 4 items in which the participant is invited to consider the mental image formed in thinking about specific scenes and situations. The vividness of the image is rated along a 5-point scale. The questionnaire has been widely used as a measure of individual differences in vividness of visual imagery. The large body of evidence confirms that the VVIQ is a valid and reliable psychometric measure of visual image vividness. In 1995 Marks published a new version of the VVIQ, the VVIQ2. This questionnaire consists of twice the number of items and reverses the rating scale so that higher scores reflect higher vividness. More recently, Campos and Pérez-Fabello evaluated the reliability and construct validity of the VVIQ and the VVIQ2. Cronbach's alpha, Cronbach's \alpha reliabilities for both the VVIQ ...
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Synesthesia
Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People with synesthesia may experience colors when listening to music, see shapes when smelling certain scents, or perceive tastes when looking at words. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person with the perception of synesthesia differing based on an individual's unique life experiences and the specific type of synesthesia that they have. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme–color synesthesia or color–graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colour, colored. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (''e.g.,'' ...
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Autobiographical Memory
Autobiographical memory (AM) is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of Episodic memory, episodic (personal experiences and specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place) and Semantic memory, semantic (general knowledge and facts about the world) memory. It is thus a type of explicit memory. Formation Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) proposed that autobiographical memory is constructed within a self-memory system (SMS), a conceptual model composed of an autobiographical knowledge base and the working self. Autobiographical knowledge base The autobiography, autobiographical knowledge base contains knowledge of the self, used to provide information on what the self is, what the self was, and what the self can be. This information is categorized into three broad areas: lifetime periods, general events, and event-specific knowledge. ''Lifetime periods'' are composed of general knowledge a ...
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Electrodermal Activity
Electrodermal activity (EDA) is the property of the human body that causes continuous variation in the electrical characteristics of the skin. Historically, EDA has also been known as skin conductance, galvanic skin response (GSR), electrodermal response (EDR), psychogalvanic reflex (PGR), skin conductance response (SCR), sympathetic skin response (SSR) and skin conductance level (SCL). The long history of research into the active and passive electrical properties of the skin by a variety of disciplines has resulted in an excess of names, now standardized to electrodermal activity (EDA). The traditional theory of EDA holds that skin resistance varies with the state of sweat glands in the skin. Sweating is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, and skin conductance is an indication of psychological or physiological arousal. If the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is highly aroused, then sweat glands activity also increases, which in turn increases sk ...
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Visual Search
Visual search is a type of perception, perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature (the target) among other objects or features (the distractors). Visual search can take place with or without eye movements. The ability to consciously locate an object or target amongst a complex array of stimuli has been extensively studied over the past 40 years. Practical examples of using visual search can be seen in everyday life, such as when one is picking out a product on a supermarket shelf, when animals are searching for food among piles of leaves, when trying to find a friend in a large crowd of people, or simply when playing visual search games such as ''Where's Wally?'' Much previous literature on visual search used reaction time in order to measure the time it takes to detect the target amongst its distractors. An example of this could be a green square (the target) amongst a set of red circles ( ...
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Hidden Picture Book
A ''Wimmelbilderbuch'' (German, literally "teeming picture book"), wimmelbook, or hidden picture book is a type of large-format, wordless picture book. It is characterized by full-spread drawings (sometimes across gatefold pages) depicting scenes richly detailed with humans, animals, and objects. Typically made for children, the drawings are filled with characters and items that may be discovered. Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hans Jurgen Press are regarded as the fathers of the format. Contemporary wimmelbook authors include Richard Scarry, Jean-Jacques Loup, Ali Mitgutsch, Mitsumasa Anno, Rotraut Susanne Berner, and Eva Scherbarth. In the United Kingdom and the United States, wimmelbooks gained popularity with the success of the '' Where's Wally?'' series by the British illustrator Martin Handford. See also * Hidden object game A hidden object game, also called hidden picture or hidden object puzzle adventure (HOPA), is a subgenre of puzzle video ...
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Aphasia
Aphasia, also known as dysphasia, is an impairment in a person's ability to comprehend or formulate language because of dysfunction in specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine, but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in developed countries. Aphasia can also be the result of brain tumors, epilepsy, autoimmune neurological diseases, brain infections, or neurodegenerative diseases (such as dementias). To be diagnosed with aphasia, a person's language must be significantly impaired in one or more of the four aspects of communication. In the case of progressive aphasia, a noticeable decline in language abilities over a short period of time is required. The four aspects of communication include spoken language production, spoken language comprehension, written language production, and written language comprehension. Impairments in any of these aspects can impact functional communication. The difficulties o ...
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Autism
Autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by differences or difficulties in social communication and interaction, a preference for predictability and routine, sensory processing differences, focused interests, and repetitive behaviors, which may include stimming. Formal diagnosis requires significant challenges in multiple domains of life, with characteristics that are atypical or more pronounced than expected for one's age and sociocultural context.(World Health Organization: International Classification of Diseases version 11 (ICD-11)): https://icd.who.int/browse/2024-01/mms/en#437815624 Motor coordination difficulties are common but not required for diagnosis. Autism is a spectrum disorder, resulting in wide variations in presentation and support needs, such as that between speaking and non-speaking populations. Increased estimates of autism prevalence since the 1990s are primarily attributed to broader c ...
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Visual Cortex
The visual cortex of the brain is the area of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information. It is located in the occipital lobe. Sensory input originating from the eyes travels through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and then reaches the visual cortex. The area of the visual cortex that receives the sensory input from the lateral geniculate nucleus is the primary visual cortex, also known as visual area 1 ( V1), Brodmann area 17, or the striate cortex. The extrastriate areas consist of visual areas 2, 3, 4, and 5 (also known as V2, V3, V4, and V5, or Brodmann area 18 and all Brodmann area 19). Both hemispheres of the brain include a visual cortex; the visual cortex in the left hemisphere receives signals from the right visual field, and the visual cortex in the right hemisphere receives signals from the left visual field. Introduction The primary visual cortex (V1) is located in and around the calcarine fissure in the occipital lobe. Each h ...
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