Visualisation and memory questionnaire

Questionnaire contributors and institutions at the time of their advice

• Professor Bradley Duchaine, Dartmouth College, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
• Dr Juha Silvanto, University of Surrey, School of Psychology
• Dr Nicola Whiffin, University of Oxford, Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics
• Dr Jeremy Wilmer, Wellesley College, Department of Psychology
• Professor Adam Zeman, University of Exeter, Department of Psychology

Yes please. There are sections of the questionnaire that may still be applicable to you, for example on your autobiographical memory (ability to remember facts, events and places) and your ability to imagine the whole range of different senses (e.g. touch, sound, smell). Any sections that might be difficult to complete if you have a visual impairment will give you the option to select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ so that you can move on to the next section.

We consider your adult life to begin at 18, so please estimate how much your abilities have changed since then.

Please answer the questions in this section based on how well you could recognise people before your eyesight started to deteriorate, if you can remember this. If this is too difficult to recall, please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ for each question.

This is not the sort of situation we mean as a change of appearance does make it harder to recognise others. Therefore, consider how well you recognise a friend or acquaintance when they have not made substantial changes to their appearance.

It can sometimes feel difficult to know whether a skill is ‘average’ or falls within the average range. Please do your best to place yourself compared to people your age in the general population. Average means you are generally like most people your age. For the purposes of this question, if you have felt that your face recognition skills are similar to most other people (e.g. in your local community or in your workplace), you are likely to be average. If you have noticed that you struggle a little or have a slightly harder time than the people around you in different settings (e.g. friends, colleagues, people in your community), you might be somewhat below average. If you have great difficulty, you may be somewhat below average or far below average.

Alternatively, if you have an easier time with this skill compared to the people you know, you may be somewhat above or far above average. If you feel unable to make this judgement, please select ‘Do not know’.

For this question, we are specifically enquiring about your face recognition ability so please consider this situation under ideal circumstances (e.g. no social anxiety, corrected eyesight).

By ‘out of context’, we mean when you encounter or observe family members and close friends or casual acquaintances in a situation where you would not typically expect to come across them.

If you do not know anyone who wears a uniform, please select the ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ option.

Make your best guess if you feel confident enough to do so, or select ‘Prefer not to answer’.

Select ‘I am unable to see the image’ for the practice question and you will then be taken to the end of this section so that you can move on to the next part of the questionnaire.

Please select ‘I am unable to see the image’ for the practice question and you will then be taken to the end of this section so that you can move on to the next part of the questionnaire.

Yes. If you recognise one of the faces but can’t remember their name, please just provide any other information that could identify them (e.g. the name of the character they played in a film, TV show or play; the name of a film, TV show or play in which they appeared; or the specific political position they held).

You are able to go back and change your answer, but your second answer will not be saved. This is because we are interested only in your initial response to the photographs.

For these questions, we are interested in how your memory is in general for specific events that occurred at least one month in the past, but you may respond according to how you remember events from any point in your life.

Yes, please answer all the questions. Questionnaires often contain altered versions of the same question to ensure that people are responding consistently, as slight variations in wording can be interpreted differently. This helps us to ensure that you are answering based on the meaning of the question, rather than the specific words used in the question.

Either make your best guess based on your experiences with navigation, or select ‘Prefer not to answer’.

Please make your best guess if you feel confident enough to do so, or select ‘Prefer not to answer’.

Please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ for both questions.

Please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’.

Please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’.

Select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’.

Please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’.

We are asking you to imagine how your body feels in these two scenarios.

We mean the shape or outline of their face, head, shoulders and body.

We mean the way they characteristically hold their head or stand when, for example, thinking or making conversation.

Synaesthesia is often described as a ‘crossing of the senses.’ In synaesthesia, one quality of
experience is accompanied by an involuntary unrelated secondary experience (e.g. hearing sounds gives rise to seeing colours).

If you have synaesthesia, you might notice that your senses tend to intertwine, giving your
perceptions of the world an additional dimension. Perhaps every time you bite into a food, you also feel its geometric shape: round, sharp, or square. Maybe when you are feeling emotional over a person you love, you can close your eyes and see certain colours playing at your field of vision. You may be reading these words with a series of accompanying voices in your head. All of these experiences are examples of synaesthesia.

Yes, we are interested to know whether you have experienced synaesthesia your whole life or for only part of your life.

We are interested to know whether when you experience synaesthesia, you always encounter the same type of synaesthesia or whether this changes. For example, do you always see a particular letter in a specific colour or does this colour ever change?

‘Sequence-space synaesthesia’, also called ‘spatial-sequence synaesthesia’, causes people who experience it to perceive numbered sequences as visual patterns. For example, they may see the days on a calendar projected in front of them, looking so real that they could touch them.

Any comments you leave will not be systematically reviewed. If you would like to tell us something that requires our immediate attention or action from us, please call our Participant Resource Centre on 0800 0 276 276 (Monday to Friday 9am-5pm).

Any information you provide will be saved and could be evaluated by researchers in the future (for example, using techniques such as ’natural language processing’). However, UK Biobank does not currently have the resources to undertake this analysis.

• NHS
• Face Blind UK
• Prosopagnosia Research

• Factsheet from Headway (the Brain Injury Association)

• Aphantasia Network
• Very Well Mind – What it’s like to have Aphantasia article

• Synaesthesia research from the University of Sussex
• UK Synaesthesia Association