Blind Mind? How Visual Imagery Affects Visual Processes

Visual imagery exists on a spectrum: some individuals have very vivid and clear images, and others have very little to no visual imagery, which is the case in a condition called aphantasia. There is a current void in the literature relating to mental imagery when identifying or generating emotions and how attentional bias could impact emotional processing. We intend to investigate the effects of visual imagery on emotion processing using a dot-probe with emotional facial and word stimuli and an emotional priming task developed by Bulter and colleagues (2008). We hypothesize that: (1) high imagers will show a higher negative attentional bias for both faces and words, (2) low imagers will show a similar negative attentional bias to faces but will not show this effect for words, and (3) low imagers will experience less intense emotional priming of faces as shown through lower emotional judgments of ambiguous images. Results are being analyzed currently