Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
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Zhao, Vogel and Bainbridge · Neuropsychologia
On average, aphantasic participants were less accurate than controls at briefly remembering colours, fractals and words, even easy-to-name ones. Visual imagery may support visual working memory, and naming items did not appear to compensate.
Geva and Lœvenbruck · Cortex
Inner speech, more than visual imagery, may support social and emotional understanding, this commentary argues. If so, social differences reported in aphantasia may not stem from missing mental pictures.
Arnold and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Researchers propose an Emergent Property Framework where imagery arises from coordinated activity across a network of brain regions. This explains why aphantasia presents with diverse multisensory profiles and varying cognitive impacts.
Gao and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In typical imagers, a bigger shift of judged action time toward a tone tended to mean a smaller shift in judged urge time, a link not clearly seen in core aphantasia. Imagery may relate to how these shifts are coordinated, not how big each one is.
Krempel and Sorrentino Marques · Philosophical Psychology
Episodic memory may not need conscious sensory imagery, a philosophical argument proposes, since people with aphantasia still recall specific past events. If so, imagery and reliving would be typical parts of remembering, not essential ones.
Takamura and colleagues · Cortex
Aphantasic individuals showed eye movement patterns similar to visualizers when exploring mental maps despite reporting no subjective imagery. This suggests aphantasia may reflect reduced metacognitive access to imagery rather than a total absence of representational content.
McCormick · International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring
In a composite case of a senior lawyer with aphantasia, a coach kept mainly to non-visual methods, such as career stories, four values words, goals and daily habits, and she said she had made some useful progress. The author suggests other coaches do the same, though the case never tried a visualization exercise.
Zhong and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers analyzed free-text comments from 25 autistic and 25 non-autistic adults with aphantasia, matched for age, who answered one open-ended question at the end of an online survey. Comments fell under imagery, thinking, and emotions and social life; more non-autistic people mentioned imagery in other senses, mostly describing it as intact, while more autistic people described themselves as thinking in words. Many described memories as known facts rather than relived scenes, and some described knowing an emotion without feeling it. The group differences rest on small numbers and a single question.
Punton and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Across two Edinburgh book festivals and an online sample (about 870 readers in all), researchers built a short questionnaire on how people imagine while reading. It picked out four strands: seeing scenes and spaces, the voice and wording of the text, modeling characters, and the reader's point of view, though the last was weakly measured. The scenes-and-spaces strand tracked vivid visual imagery most closely, and both it and character modeling went with feeling absorbed in stories. The study did not look at people with aphantasia separately.
Baade and colleagues · Chemistry Education Research and Practice
Students who reported more vivid spatial imagery answered more stereochemistry questions correctly, while visual imagery vividness showed no such link. This suggests visual vividness alone does not capture the imagery these tasks draw on.
Huson and colleagues · L’Année psychologique
Silently repeating a syllable biased what typical imagers heard in an ambiguous sound, but people reporting no inner voice showed less bias on average. Inner speech may happen without any sound quality, though the test cannot yet assess individuals.
Monzel, Reuter and Schultz · L’Année psychologique
Aphantasic participants leaned more than controls toward calling a moving dot not alive, with no clear difference in how fast they gathered evidence. Slower responses in aphantasia may reflect a starting lean rather than slower processing.
Vanbuckhave and colleagues · L’Année psychologique
Among 50 typical imagers, pupils showed no clear difference when imagining dark versus bright triangles, and only 56% showed the expected pattern. Pupil size may not be a reliable objective test for aphantasia.
Torres, Faucheu and Witt · L’Année psychologique
People with aphantasia on average rated textures seen only in photos as less likable and less pleasant to touch than controls. Imagining touch may take more effort without imagery; the authors suggest that effort gets blamed on the textures.
Cavalli and Plancher · L’Année psychologique
Aphantasia is varied rather than one uniform condition, with implications for thinking, perception, emotion and social life, an editorial argues. Objective markers of absent imagery, and clearer lines between its types, are still needed.
Schelp and Lambert · Auditory Perception & Cognition
In an online survey of 344 people, recruited partly through aphantasia and neurodiversity forums, those with no mind's ear (who cannot imagine sounds) or no inner voice scored lower on unusual experiences and beliefs linked to psychosis risk, and people who reported no visual imagery scored very slightly lower. Those with no mind's ear also scored a little higher on withdrawal and loss of interest. A very vivid mind's ear went with slightly more unusual experiences, while a very vivid inner voice made no difference. Effects ranged from very small to medium, and all measures were self-report questionnaires.
Hing and Sibley-White · Educating Young People for a Sustainable Future
Four university students with aphantasia said open creative tasks, holding several ideas in mind and putting things in order made school harder, and described strikingly similar strategies: talking things through, ready-made examples, ideally ones they could hold, and step-by-step plans. The authors argue for treating aphantasia as neurodiversity.
Wright and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia rated feeling a movement in the mind as hard but easier than seeing it, especially right after doing the movement. This suggests kinesthetic imagery may exist without visual imagery, though weakly.
Jablonka and Cohen · Trends Open
Researchers propose aphantasia represents an extreme evolutionary trade-off where the brain hyperoptimizes for abstract semantics by suppressing metabolically expensive visual recall. This suggests aphantasia may have facilitated the cultural transition to abstract writing systems.
Stewart and Brick Taft · Journal of the International Society for Teacher Education
In one school, 13.8% of 94 fourth graders scored in the aphantasia range and 27.7% in the hyperphantasia range, both above adult estimates. The authors suggest teachers offer strategies that do not rely on picturing.