Sarah Haigh and Debbie Davis: Aphantasia and face recognition: Why the rush?
Title
Aphantasia and face recognition: Why the rush?
Mentors
Department
Biosketch
Sarah Haigh, Ph.D., is an associate professor in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research is driven by two fundamental questions: why are some people sensitive to their environment, to the point of inducing discomfort and headaches, whereas others are not? What impact does this have on their ability to process incoming information?
Debbie Davis, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research broadly concerns psychology and law, with focus on three specific areas: applications of memory in the legal system (including eyewitness identification); police interrogation and confessions; and sexual consent communication.
Project overview
Aphantasia is defined as being unable to mentally visualize objects or scenes, in other words, an absence of the ‘mind’s eye’. While around 4% of the general population experience aphantasia, many more report weak mental imagery, suggesting that this exists on a spectrum with ~4% experiencing hyperphantasia (vivid mental imagery that is close to lifelike). Visualization is a common learning technique and individuals with aphantasia often exhibit worse memory recognition as a result. Some aphantasics score as “super-recognizers” of faces despite their inability to visualize the face after initial exposure. One self-reported mechanism of this is their effort to first conceptualize and memorize features of the face (e.g., verbalize the shape of the nose or ear and remember that description). This implies that more exposure time is needed for an aphantasic to later be able to recognize a face. In the current study, we want to assess the relationship between the ability to visualize information with the ability to recognize faces and then examine how this relationship changes depending on how much time the participants are given to memorize the faces.
Students will learn how to conduct scientifically rigorous behavioral studies to address real-world problems. They will be involved in the design of the study, recruiting participants, running the study (with lots of supervision until the student feels ready to be independent), and analyze the data.
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