Congenital aphantasia is not imagery blindsight
Bartolomeo and ArcangeliMarch 2026
Our summary in plain words
What This Study Is About
This paper explores whether aphantasia—the inability to create mental images—is similar to "blindsight," a condition where people with brain damage can respond to visual information without consciously seeing it. The researchers argue that while both involve a lack of visual experience, the way people with aphantasia access information is fundamentally different from blindsight.
How They Studied It
This is a "viewpoint" paper, meaning the authors analyzed existing research and brain science rather than conducting a new experiment on a specific group of people. They compared the performance and brain activity of people with congenital aphantasia (those born without a "mind's eye") against people with blindsight and typical visualizers to see if the "blindsight" comparison holds up.
What They Found
The researchers found two major differences that set aphantasia apart from blindsight:
- Performance Levels: People with blindsight usually perform only slightly better than a random guess. In contrast, people with aphantasia often perform just as well as typical visualizers on memory and spatial tasks, even without "seeing" the images.
- The "Just Knowing" Factor: When people with blindsight get an answer right, they often feel like they are just guessing. People with aphantasia, however, often report that they "just know" the answer. They have conscious access to the information (like knowing spinach is darker than lettuce) even if they can't picture it.
What This Might Mean
The study suggests that aphantasia isn't a total lack of visual information, but rather a "disconnection" in the brain. The information is there, but it isn't being translated into a "vision-like" format. This helps explain why people with aphantasia can be highly successful in visual fields like design or science; their brains are using different, non-visual routes to access the same facts and spatial data.
One Interesting Detail
The authors point out that while people with aphantasia are confident in their knowledge, they may show "reduced metacognitive accuracy." This means that while they get the answers right, they might be less accurate at judging exactly how well they performed on tasks specifically designed to test mental imagery.
This summary was written with AI and may contain errors. Check the original paper.
Authors
Paolo Bartolomeo
11 papers in the libraryMargherita Arcangeli
1 paper in the library
Cite this paper
Bartolomeo, P., & Arcangeli, M. (2026). Congenital aphantasia is not imagery blindsight. Cortex, 197, 112–114. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2026.02.009
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