What This Study Is About

When you shop online you can see a fabric but not feel it. The paper notes that imagining the touch appears to be the main way people make up for this. This study asked how people with aphantasia, the absence or near absence of voluntary mental imagery, judge how textures would feel when they can only see them.

How They Studied It

This was an online experiment comparing two groups of 22 people.

Aphantasic participants were recruited through the Aphantasia Club, a French association. They scored 16 to 32 on the VVIQ (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire), a 16-item questionnaire scored from 16 to 80.

Controls were psychology students who scored above 40.

The task: participants saw photos of 18 everyday materials, such as silk, sandpaper and glass, with each name on screen. They imagined caressing each one, then rated it twice on a 1 to 5 scale.

Once for how much they liked it. The authors treated this as a quick, emotional "liking" judgment.

Once for how pleasant it was to touch. The authors treated this as a more deliberate "beauty" judgment.

Questionnaires covered imagery in seven sensory domains, need for touch, and personality.

What They Found

Aphantasic participants rated the textures lower overall than controls: an average of 3.05 against 3.25 out of 5. They rated lower for pleasant, neutral and unpleasant textures alike.

The authors expected aphantasia to affect beauty judgments more. That was not supported. The main analysis found no clear difference between the two kinds of judgment in how the groups compared. Tested separately, aphantasic participants rated lower on both.

The paper's title rests on a different result. VVIQ scores were linked to liking ratings (r = .348), while their link to beauty ratings (r = .293) fell just short of significance.

Other results:

Aphantasic participants reported weak imagery in all seven domains. Tactile imagery averaged 4 out of 50, against 40.6 for controls.

They found it much harder to imagine touching the textures: 2.26 against 5.84 on a 1 to 7 scale.

They scored lower on openness to experience. The groups differed on the item "Has a great imagination" but showed no clear difference on the item about interest in art.

The groups showed no clear difference in need for touch.

What This Might Mean

The authors suggest that imagining the touch took more effort without imagery, and that participants may have blamed the textures for that difficulty and rated them lower. They also suggest that weaker emotional responses could affect liking. Neither idea was measured directly.

The evidence is limited:

The sample was small: 22 people per group.

The groups differed in age and in how they were recruited.

All ratings were self-reports, made online, from photographs.

The "liking more than beauty" claim compares a significant correlation with a near-significant one. It was never tested directly.

The authors note that the personality analysis lacked statistical power.

One Interesting Detail

Controls found pleasant textures like silk easier to imagine touching than unpleasant ones like sandpaper. Aphantasic participants reported no such difference.

Research L’Année psychologique

Aphantasia affects liking more than beauty judgments in visual evaluation of tactile aesthetics of textures

Torres, Faucheu and WittSeptember 2026

Read the paper

Abstract
What This Study Is About
How They Studied It
What They Found
What This Might Mean
One Interesting Detail
Authors
Cite this paper

Abstract

Touch provides crucial information about the physical world, including hedonic aspects. In certain contexts, such as online shopping, the absence of tactile sensation renders the multisensory experience incomplete, though mental imagery may compensate for this absence. However, 2 to 4% of the population is affected by aphantasia, a condition characterized by reduced or absent mental imagery. This study examined the impact of aphantasia on the tactile aesthetics of textures presented visually. An aphantasic group (N=22) and a control group (N=22) evaluated the tactile aesthetics of textures presented visually in terms of liking and beauty, and completed questionnaires (VVIQ, Psi-Q, NFT, BFI). Results showed that aphantasia affects all sensory dimensions, reducing openness to experience and leading to lower aesthetic judgments. Our findings confirm that aphantasia impacts aesthetic judgments when the multisensory experience is incomplete.

Our summary in plain words

What This Study Is About

How They Studied It

This was an online experiment comparing two groups of 22 people.

Controls were psychology students who scored above 40.

The task: participants saw photos of 18 everyday materials, such as silk, sandpaper and glass, with each name on screen. They imagined caressing each one, then rated it twice on a 1 to 5 scale.

Once for how much they liked it. The authors treated this as a quick, emotional "liking" judgment.

Once for how pleasant it was to touch. The authors treated this as a more deliberate "beauty" judgment.

Questionnaires covered imagery in seven sensory domains, need for touch, and personality.

What They Found

Aphantasic participants rated the textures lower overall than controls: an average of 3.05 against 3.25 out of 5. They rated lower for pleasant, neutral and unpleasant textures alike.

The paper's title rests on a different result. VVIQ scores were linked to liking ratings (r = .348), while their link to beauty ratings (r = .293) fell just short of significance.

Other results:

Aphantasic participants reported weak imagery in all seven domains. Tactile imagery averaged 4 out of 50, against 40.6 for controls.

They found it much harder to imagine touching the textures: 2.26 against 5.84 on a 1 to 7 scale.

They scored lower on openness to experience. The groups differed on the item "Has a great imagination" but showed no clear difference on the item about interest in art.

The groups showed no clear difference in need for touch.

What This Might Mean

The evidence is limited:

The sample was small: 22 people per group.

The groups differed in age and in how they were recruited.

All ratings were self-reports, made online, from photographs.

The "liking more than beauty" claim compares a significant correlation with a near-significant one. It was never tested directly.

The authors note that the personality analysis lacked statistical power.

One Interesting Detail

Controls found pleasant textures like silk easier to imagine touching than unpleasant ones like sandpaper. Aphantasic participants reported no such difference.

This summary was written with AI and may contain errors. Check the original paper.

Authors

Cite this paper

Torres, J., Faucheu, J., & Witt, A. (2026). Aphantasia affects liking more than beauty judgments in visual evaluation of tactile aesthetics of textures. L’Année psychologique, Vol. 126(2), 203–229. doi:10.3917/anpsy1.262.0203

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