---
language:
- en
tags:
- medical
- psychology
pretty_name: Aphantasic Drawing Dataset
---
# Aphantasic Drawing Dataset
<!-- Provide a quick summary of the dataset. -->
This dataset contains data from an online memory drawing experiment conducted with individuals with aphantasia and normal imagery.
### Dataset Description
<!-- Provide a longer summary of what this dataset is. -->
This dataset comes from the Brain Bridge Lab from the University of Chicago.
It is from an online memory drawing experiment with 61 individuals with aphantasia
and 52 individuals with normal imagery. In the experiment participants 1) studied 3
separate scene photographs presented one after the other 2) drew them from memory, 3)
completed a recognition task 4) copied the images while viewing them 5) filled out a VVIQ
and OSIQ questionnaire and also demographics questions. The scenes the participants were asked
to draw were of a kitchen, bedroom, and living room. The control (normal imagery) and
treatment group (aphantasia) were determined by VVIQ scores. Those with a score >=40 were control
and those with scores <=25 were in the aphantasia group. For more info on the experiment and design
follow the paper linked below.
The original repository for the data from the experiment
was made available on the OSF website linked below.
It was created July 31, 2020 and last updated September 27, 2023.
- **Curated by:** Wilma Bainbridge, Zoe Pounder, Alison Eardley, Chris Baker
#### Example Analysis
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1ZmHxg45WIWuUn6pcyb7BBk3zwJovLe5z?usp=sharing
### Dataset Sources
<!-- Provide the basic links for the dataset. -->
- **Original Repository:** https://osf.io/cahyd/
- **Paper:** https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.014
## Dataset Structure
<!-- This section provides a description of the dataset fields, and additional information about the dataset structure such as criteria used to create the splits, relationships between data points, etc. -->
Example of the structure of the data:
```
{
"subject_id": 111,
"treatment": "aphantasia",
"demographics": {
"country": "United States",
"age": 56,
"gender": "male",
"occupation": "sales/music",
"art_ability": 3,
"art_experience": "None",
"device": "desktop",
"input": "mouse",
"difficult": "memorydrawing",
"diff_explanation": "drawing i have little patience for i can do it but i will spend hours editing (never got the hang of digital drawing on screens",
"vviq_score": 16,
"osiq_score": 61
},
"drawings": {
"kitchen": {
"perception": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
"memory": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>
},
"livingroom": {
"perception": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
"memory": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>
},
"bedroom": {
"perception": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
"memory": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>
}
},
"image": {
"kitchen": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
"livingroom": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>,
"bedroom": <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGB size=500x500>
}
}
```
## Data Fields
- subject_id: Subject ID
- treatment: group for the experiment based on VVIQ score; "aphantasia"(VVIQ<=25) or "control"(VVIQ>=40)
- country: Participants Country
- age: Age
- gender: Gender
- occupation: Occupation
- art_ability: Self-Report rating of art ability from 1-5
- art_experience: Description of participant's art experience
- device: Device used for the experiment (desktop or laptop)
- input: What participant used to draw (mouse, trackpad, etc.)
- difficult: Part of the experiment participant though was most challenging
- diff_explanation: Explanation of why they thought the part specified in "difficult" was hard
- vviq_score: VVIQ test total points (16 questions from 0-5)
- osiq_score: OSIQ test total points (30 questions from 0-5)
- perception drawings: Participant drawings of kitchen, living room, and bedroom from perception part of experiment
- memory drawings: Participant drawings of kitchen, living room, and bedroom from memory part of experiment
- image: Actual images (stimuli) participants had to draw (kitchen, living room, bedroom)
## Dataset Creation
### Source Data
<!-- This section describes the source data (e.g. news text and headlines, social media posts, translated sentences, ...). -->
The orignal repository for the data included a folder for the participant's drawings (1 for aphantasia and 1 for control),
a folder of the scene images they had to draw (stimuli), and a excel file with the demographic survey and test
score data.
The excel file had 117 rows and the 2 folders for aphantasia and control had 115 subject folders total.
Subject 168 did not fill out the demographic information or take the VVIQ and OSIQ test and
subjects 160, 161, and 162 did not have any drawings. 160, 161, and 162 were removed during the data
cleaning process and the final parquet file has 115 participants.
#### Data Collection and Processing
<!-- This section describes the data collection and processing process such as data selection criteria, filtering and normalization methods, tools and libraries used, etc. -->
The original excel file did not have total score for the VVIQ and OSIQ tests, but instead
individual points for each questions. The total score was calculated from these numbers.
The orignal drawing folders for each participant had typically 18 files. There were 6 files
of interest: The 3 drawings from the memory part of the experiment, and the 3 drawings from
the perception part of the experiment. They had file names that were easy to distinguish:
For memory: sub{subid}-mem{1,2,or 3}-{room}.png where the room was either livingroom, bedroom, or kitchen
and 1,2, or 3 depending on the order in which the participant did the drawings.
For perception: sub{subid}-pic{1,2,or 3}-{room}.png
These files were matched with the excel file rows by subject ID,
so each participant typically had 6 drawings total. Some of the drawings were blank white images or
had a question mark drawn indicating the participant could not recall the image. These images were removed.
The actual image folder had 3 images (kitchen, living room, bedroom) that
were replicated to go with each of the 115 participants.
The final format of the data is shown above.
For a look at the code used to process the data follow this google colab link:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1Oz1QL0mD9g3lVBgtmqHa-QiwwIJ2JaX5?usp=drive_link
#### Data Producers
<!-- This section describes the people or systems who originally created the data. It should also include self-reported demographic or identity information for the source data creators if this information is available. -->
The contributors of the original dataset and authors of the paper are:
- Wilma Bainbridge (University of Chicago Department of Psychology & Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA),
- Zoë Pounder (Department of Psychology, University of Westminster, London, UK)
- Alison Eardley (Department of Psychology, University of Westminster, London, UK)
- Chris Baker (Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA)
## Citation
<!-- If there is a paper or blog post introducing the dataset, the APA and Bibtex information for that should go in this section. -->
**BibTeX:**
@misc{Bainbridge_Pounder_Eardley_Baker_2023,
title={Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory},
url={osf.io/cahyd},
publisher={OSF},
author={Bainbridge, Wilma A and Pounder, Zoë and Eardley, Alison and Baker, Chris I},
year={2023},
month={Sep}
}
**APA:**
Bainbridge, W. A., Pounder, Z., Eardley, A., & Baker, C. I. (2023, September 27). Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory. Retrieved from osf.io/cahyd
## Glossary
<!-- If relevant, include terms and calculations in this section that can help readers understand the dataset or dataset card. -->
Aphantasia: The inability to create visual imagery, keeping you from visualizing things in your mind.
