Visual mental imagery: an English-language assessment battery for different perceptual and imagery domains with clustered results

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Zixin Liu¹, Tengyu Song², Kezia Chuaqui³, Shambhavi Tomar³, Kassey Chang², Natalie Baer⁴, Rachel Frank³, Lucas Manning³, Jianghao Liu⁵, Paolo Bartolomeo⁵, Alfredo Spagna³; ¹Teachers College, Columbia University, ²Department of Statistics, Columbia University, ³Department of Psychology, Columbia University, ⁴Department of Psychology, Barnard College, ⁵Sorbonne Université, Institut du Cerveau - Paris Brain Institute - ICM, Inserm, CNRS, AP-HP, Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, F-75013 Paris, France

Introduction: Do visual mental imagery (VMI) and visual perception share common cognitive mechanisms when processing domain-specific information? Moreover, do domains cluster in imagery similar to perception? To address these questions, we used an English Imagery and Perception battery (eBIP), adapted from its French version. Methods: The battery assesses participants' performance in identifying objects' physical properties through either imagery (audio cues) or perception (audiovisual cues). This assessment compares five domains for imagery and perception: color, shape, map, face, and letter. We present preliminary results from healthy participants (n=64). Data Analysis: To replicate our previous results, we first analyzed the correlations between imagery and perception and then conducted a 2 (Imagery, Perception) x 5 (domains) ANOVA on accuracy and response time (RT). Results were consistent with those from the French battery. To examine whether the domains cluster similarly between imagery and perception, we first applied K-means clustering to categorize each person’s domain performances using accuracy and normalized RT. We identified four distinct clusters characterized by high/low accuracy x high/low RT. Further analysis using log-linear models on these clusters’ contingency tables revealed their primary compositions: (1) face imagery, (2) color and shape, (3) map perception, and (4) mixed components. Discussion: Our results indicate participants' quick and accurate responses in color and shape tasks, quick but less accurate responses in face imagery, and slow yet precise responses to map perception. These variances in domain-specific performance between imagery and perception hint at potential differences in their underlying cognitive mechanisms.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Other