Assessing the effects of mental imagery (and its absence) on language and the perception of time. Experimental psycholinguistic research on aphantasia

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Cognitive linguistic research suggests that language relies upon many aspects of cognition, ratherthan utilising a specific, isolated part of the brain (Langacker 2002). Furthermore, this research hasaddressed the variety of ways humans perceive time; finding that culture and language patterns canaffect the way speakers perceive this abstract concept (Boroditsky et al. 2010). These studies haveadditionally shown that the human brain is malleable when it comes to cognitive tasks, and that evenlanguage itself can be the catalyst for enacting change.Mental imagery forms the basis of our visual imaginations, where both automated and cognizantmental simulations play a huge role in our perception, memory, creativity and reverie; scholarssuggest mental imagery is vital for cognition on the whole (Kosslyn et al. 2006), yet there are stillmany unknown aspects to mental imagery and the neurological processes behind it.Whilst mental imagery and the mind's eye have received attention across fields such as psychologyand the neurosciences, their absence remains an understudied phenomenon. The ability to conjuremental images is one that many of us take for granted, yet recently the complete inability to producemental imagery was finally named as aphantasia (Zeman et al. 2015). Those with aphantasia cannotwillingly or automatically produce mental imagery, and have no visual memory to draw from.Researching aphantasia should prove to be extremely insightful as to the cognitive importance ofmental images, and how their presence or absence affects our perception.This interdisciplinary project aims to analyse those with aphantasia using empirically testedexperimental methods, and through comparison to control participants, investigating whether mentalimagery (and its absence) affects the perception of time and the cognitive link to language.