Now You See, Now You Don't...

Overview

This project focused on proving that those with aphantasia are at a disadvantage when it comes to standardized testing. Aphantasia is the inability to form mental images of objects that are not present, and standardized testing (highly focused on memorization), could impact people with aphantasia's testing abilities. Standardized testing is the most common type of testing across the world, and aphantasia's impact on school-aged children, specifically the lack of visualization could result in the need for a redesign or restructure of the test. The driving question was how aphantasia affects one’s test-taking ability, and the process behind the experimentation was to find whether or not someone had aphantasia or not via a survey, and then make sure all participants took the same standardized test in the same conditions. After determining the likelihood that someone had aphantasia, a correlation was drawn between this and the scores on memorization-based portions of the test. The data found were that those who had a higher likelihood of having aphantasia tended to score worse on memorization-based portions of the test, while the non-memorization-based portions of the test had more equal results (people likely and unlikely to have aphantasia scored similarly). Overall, the conclusions found were that aphantasia led to more issues with standardized testing once memorization and imagery came into play.

Competition history

• ISEF 2022 Behavioral and Social Sciences · Entry BEHA016 · Atlanta, Georgia, United States Affiliated fair in KY, United States of America

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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