Can You Imagine That: Individual Differences in Visual Mental Imagery

Differences in mental imagery ability between individuals have been reported since Galton in 1880. Despite much progress in the mental imagery field, particularly with the advent of neuroimaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging, the neural bases of mental imagery and why individual differences exist in mental imagery ability are not fully understood. Several subjective and objective methods have been proposed and utilized to investigate the strength of visual mental imagery, and even to predict the content of imagery. Recent evidence has shown that people with opposite extremes of visual mental imagery ability, aphantasia and hyperphantasia, have selective impairments and enhancements of ability to visualize visual elements in imagery. We argue that this heterogeneity is generalizable to the population who have relatively normal imagery ability. Current studies have overgeneralized specific paradigms and stimuli to apply to visual mental imagery ability of all types of stimuli, under the presumption that this ability is homogenous. Future studies would benefit from both increased granularity and expanded scope of paradigms and stimuli used.