I hate Outlook so very much... 😒🤦

⚠️ Reminder: 2 weeks left until the abstract submission deadline for APCV & EPC 2026.

Abstracts are due on 30 April 2026.

Please also note that all presenters—including speakers and discussants in symposia—must register for the conference by the early-bird deadline on 15 May 2026.

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Article slamming preprints cites *nine* preprints. You can't make this stuff up.

Meet our final keynote speaker for APCV & EPC 2026!

Dr Corey Wadsley from the University of Auckland will present a keynote lecture titled "Stopping safely: Physiological underpinnings of response inhibition."

Experimenter bias creep is definitely a major problem in mental imagery research. This is part of what inspired my interest in this actually. Definitely worth questioning all those assumptions!

But even with something of an external reference that could allow more meaningful comparisons between people, I am not sure you can have something that is stronger/clearer/more vivid than actually seeing something solid. But mental image could be more opaque than a retinal afterimage for example?

Of course this is massively confounded by the Plato's Cave issue that we just don't know how others experience this & on your criterion. If you're like me, then nobody who doesn't hallucinate should ever say it's "like real seeing" if this is meant to be about literally seeing something.

This is a good point, although this probably depends on the reference used & if there can logically be a supra level. What would exaggerated look like? In the VVIQ the highest level is "like normal vision" or, in the modified version arguably even worse, "like real seeing". Can you go much higher?

In any case, a general theme in the literature is that the average trial-wise vividness rating & VVIQ scores are usually fairly well correlated. So they do seem to track the same variance. Here is two plots from recent experiments where we have this:

That said, I looked at some of our unpublished data whether people who say they "project" images are more variable in their vividness ratings. No relationship there. But the projector question was about frequency of projecting, not about ability & we need better ways of quantifying projection.

But other people clearly vary their vividness across trials. This could link back to the Plato's Cave issue we discuss in our study: if you "see" mental images, then quite possibly you experience more variation in the clarity/intensity/opacity/etc across trials? So this issue could confound that too

I find that quite odd personally because for me this is not the case. Some people (like me) will just respond with the same vividness on each trial. If it's a Gabor task, I'd always say minimal vividness. If it's a complex scene, I'd say highly vivid. My mental imagery ain't made for gratings... 😏

But it at least suggests that similar measures correlate quite strongly with each other within participant. Regarding within-subject variations more generally, a lot of studies actually use trial-wise vividness ratings in experiments (e.g. in priming studies) & they swear that there is variability.

Trial-by-trial doesn't make that much sense for this because these are specific questions. The VVIQ2 contains 32 questions & as our study shows they all correlate with one another pretty strongly (see Figure 4A). But ofc this is because they are all so redundant & I wouldn't consider this "trials".

Let me answer that first because it's more straightforward:
Reliability: We haven't done a direct test as these were anonymous surveys. But I'd expect it to be pretty strong for many of the variables given how strongly many of the classical vividness scales correlate (e.g. VVIQ vs apple vs beach)

So I certainly don't regard this study as the conclusive end here. It's really only a first step from which we can base future work. (I'm sure this is true about almost all science of course but I think here it is particularly the case).

It certainly remains debatable (and we have internally debated this a lot between the authors - particularly fun when some of them identify as aphantasic) in how far people will interpret or follow these explicit instructions. There are probably ways to improve the consistency of this further...

And I think we can cover some ground with clear & explicit instructions. In our surveys here, we were pretty direct with participants that they were to report it they "literally see" mental images, if they "float before their eyes" etc, & being clear that some say they have mental images w/o seeing.

Having a task with any reference has got to be better than a task without one. The latter is how most of this research has so far worked. Even when using trial-wise vividness judgements you are only using an internal reference but have nothing external to anchor it on. Going beyond that is a start.

Not sure if this is specific comment about something in the study or more general. But either way, you highlight an obvious major challenge for all research into mental imagery & these are the nagging doubts the fuel my drive to change the way we study it. But my short answer to your question is:

cc #mentalimagery #aphantasia #hyperphantasia #neuroskyence #visionscience #psychscisky

Happy to report that our survey study on the diversity with which people seem to experience their mental imagery is now published in RSOS :) doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
I posted a longer thread summarising the findings some months ago when we first put out the preprint: bsky.app/profile/samp...

Meet our second keynote speaker for APCV & EPC 2026!

Prof. Elaine Reese from the University of Otago will deliver a keynote lecture titled "Memory Development: From Basic Science to Applied Approaches."

Next up: Keynote Speaker Announcements.

Introducing the first speaker for APCV & EPC 2026!

Prof. Hakwan Lau will present a keynote lecture titled "Prefrontal Mechanisms for Perception."

I missed all this kerfuffle last year becuase I was preoccupied with other things but gawd this is some bullshit. I'm glad now that I didn't submit my last paper to a Wiley journal as I had considered...

Thanks I'll investigate :)

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another.
doi.org/10.64898/202...

I had been looking for other options but none seemed to work the way I wanted - having access to the calendar outside campus is one thing that would actually be useful to me. I do have my work calendar shared with my Google but it only says that I'm "Busy" not what I'll be busy with 😉

Oh I don't care about this either. What do you use? I liked to do this directly in Thunderbird but that is one of the parts that they broke...