Data for "The Ganzflicker Experience: Rhythmic visual flicker induces complex illusions in people with visual imagery but not aphantasia"
Description
----------------------------------------------- DESCRIPTION ----------------------------------------------- README for the data and analysis scripts for the manuscript currently titled "The Ganzflicker Experience: Rhythmic visual flicker induces complex illusions in people with visual imagery but not aphantasia" by Varg T Königsmark, Johanna Bergmann, and Reshanne R Reeder. Submitted to Mendeley Data by Reshanne Reeder. The experiment was performed entirely online, and all responses to the questionnaire were collected with Google Forms, and downloaded in .ods format (LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet). Several responses on the questionnaire were text statements, which were recoded as single digits for analysis. All names, e-mail addresses, and personalized written responses were removed so that individuals could not be identified. The coded data are saved in .csv format to perform analyses in JASP. Scripts to create the figures in the manuscript are coded in python. Abstract Rhythmic visual flicker is known to induce illusions and altered states of consciousness. Previous research has suggested that the form of “simple” illusions (e.g., geometric patterns) is constrained by the functional architecture of early visual cortical areas. As of yet, the nature of more “complex” illusions (e.g., naturalistic living and non-living things) is under-represented within the current literature. Very recent findings showed that visual imagery vividness correlates positively with the likelihood to experience anomalous percepts. Here, we tested whether imagery ability is associated with individual differences in both susceptibility to, and complexity of, flicker-induced illusions (FII). We recruited a sample of people with aphantasia (the complete lack of visual imagery) and a sample of people with imagery. We found that people with visual imagery were more susceptible to FII than people with aphantasia. Moreover, moderately-vivid imagers were more likely to see complex FII than weakly-vivid imagers, whereas people with aphantasia only experienced simple FII. People with and without imagery experienced a similar range of emotions during Ganzflicker stimulation, but people with imagery experienced more altered states of consciousness. These findings fit with recent research on the connection between visual imagery strength (specifically, the influence of imagery on perception) and visual cortical excitability. Visual imagery ability and anomalous perceptual experience may depend on the same cortical mechanism that gates effects of visual stimulation on natural cortical excitability levels. Future studies will investigate whether more fine-grained changes in cortical excitability induced by different visual flicker frequencies can modulate FII-susceptibility and FII-complexity.
Files
Steps to reproduce
In each script, change the name of the directory to your own directory. Change the filename to one of the filenames here. Before you analyze different columns, remove NaNs.