An integration model of mental imagery and aphantasia: Conceptual framework, neuromechanistic pathways, and clinical implications

Abstract

Aphantasia, the strong diminution or complete absence of mental imagery, challenges long-standing views of imagery as central to cognition. Competing accounts variously explain the phenomenon as a failure of sensory reactivation or as unconscious mental imagery. Here, we propose a new framework, the integration model of aphantasia, which argues that reactivated sensory information must undergo multi-stage integration to yield imagery experience. Against unconscious imagery accounts, we argue that the neural activations observed in aphantasics are not imagery but sensory precursors: rudimentary sensory codes that lack perceptual status. Only when sensory precursors are locally integrated do they become perceptual representations, and only when these are further integrated with interoceptive signals do they give rise to conscious imagery experience. We present the integration model as a dual-stream framework that unifies recent attention- and interoception-based accounts, situate it within existing theories of mental imagery and aphantasia, and highlight its clinical relevance. In doing so, we reframe the debate on unconscious imagery and draw attention to the role of multi-stage integration as a key mechanism underlying mental imagery and its absence across different subtypes of aphantasia.