Published: Dec. 8, 2019

Individual variability in imagery experiences has long attracted the interest of philosophers, educators, and psychologists. Since Aristotle’s time, it was assumed that imagery is a universal ability, so everyone possesses it. Galton first measured the vividness of subjective imagery experiences, and discovered that some individuals reported zero imagination. Recent research has coined the term “aphantasia” — an inability to form mental imagery, or having a “blind mind’s eye” (Zeman, Dewar, & Della Sala, 2015). We argue that there maybe more than one type of aphantasia. Substantial behavioral and neuropsychological evidence has demonstrated a distinction between visual-object imagery (mental visualization of …

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Published: June 24, 2018

In emotional facial expressions, sequential effects can result in perceptual changes of a briefly presented test expression due to a preceding prolonged exposure to an adaptor expression. Most studies have shown contrastive (adaptation) aftereffects using static adaptors: a test is perceived as less similar to the adaptor. However, the existence and sign of sequential effects caused by dynamic information in the adaptors are controversial. In a behavioral experiment we tested the influence of realistic (recorded from an actors face) and artificial (linearly morphed) dynamic transitions between happy and disgusted facial expressions, and of static images of these expressions at their …

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Published: Aug. 23, 2019

If a well-known word is a part of an anagram stimulus, it may complicate the process of solving the anagram. This may happen because a word inside the anagram may serve as a semantic prime, or because such a word is a chunk that is difficult to decompose. We manipulated the structural features of word and nonword chunks in anagram stimuli to find out which features of a chunk, semantic or structural, are more influential in anagram solving. The results showed that the semantic but not the structural features of a chunk are more important for five-letter anagrams, while none …

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Published: Dec. 25, 2019

One of the main research questions related to creativity is the dilemma of specificity vs. non-specificity of the mechanisms underlying insight solutions as compared to analytical solutions of a problem. The first goal of our study was to verify insight solution specificity on solving anagram tasks. The second goal was to test a hypothesis about the existence of unconscious processing prior to insight solutions. We presented two types of stimuli to participants: anagrams and pseudowords. During the experiment, participants had to perform two successive tasks. First they had to judge whether they were being shown an anagram or a pseudoword, …

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