Visual imagination and the performance of undergraduate economics students

Abstract

There is known to be substantial variation in the quality of individuals’ visual imagery, but little is known about the effects of this variation on student learning outcomes. This is of particular concern in subjects such as economics that involve extensive use of graphical or pictorial representations. We present the results of a study comparing the quality of visual imagery with undergraduate examination performance. The quality of visual imagery was significantly associated with overall examination performance, but this result was driven entirely by the associations for male participants. Among males, the association was significantly larger for graphical questions than for mathematical questions, and a high mathematical question grade was associated with a significantly smaller association between the quality of visual imagery and the graphical question grade. Poor visual imagery can impair performance in undergraduate economics, at least among male students.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual imagery
• aphantasia
• economics

JEL Code:

• A22

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Keogh & Pearson found that congenital aphantasia was associated with the absence of a sensory image rather than the absence of metacognition. However, this may not be the case when aphantasia is a consequence of neurological damage or psychiatric disorder.

2 See the Method section for a description of the VVIQ.

3 See for example Isaac and Marks (1994).

4 A related question, addressed by Hegarty and Kozhevnikov (1999), is whether visual imagery is useful in solving mathematical problems. Hegarty and Kozhevnikov found that the use of schematic spatial representations was positively associated with the ability to solve mathematical problems, but the use of pictorial representations was negatively associated with the ability to solve mathematical problems. It is possible that aphantasia is associated with an inability to use pictorial representations, but it is far from clear that aphantasia is also associated with an inability to use schematic spatial representations, and no study has measured these associations.

5 The A range is 80–100%.

6 This t-ratio is based on standard errors computed using a bootstrap with 1,000 replications.

7 The parameters of equation (3) are estimated under the assumption that g₁ is independent of g₂ and g₃. Monte Carlo analysis indicates that if this assumption is violated, the estimate of ϕ_k will be biased towards zero. The results below should therefore be interpreted as conservative estimates of the extent to which mathematical ability reduces the size of the association between performance in the non-mathematical questions and the quality of visual imagery. It is also possible that there is an association between mathematical ability and performance in the graphical question (or in the other questions) independent of the quality of visual imagery, in which case an extra term θ_k g₁ should be added to the right hand side of equation (3). When such a term is included in the equation, estimates of θ_k are insignificantly different from zero.

8 Possible pathways include (i) students with good visual imagination can more easily remember their homes, and this mitigates homesickness (Burt, 1993), (ii) visual imagination makes it easier to multi-task (Killin, 2011), so students with poor visual imagination are more easily distracted, and (iii) poor visual imagination is associated with poor memory (Albers et al., 2013; Jacobs et al., 2018). All of these pathways merit further study in economics.