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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Punton and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Researchers developed the ReaderBank Imagination Quiz to identify four distinct dimensions of the reading imagination. This tool reveals that reading involves a complex mosaic of sensory, social, and perspective-based cognitive processes.
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.
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.
Schelp and Lambert · Auditory Perception & Cognition
Individuals with anauralia and anendophasia show lower positive schizotypy, while anauralia is linked to higher negative schizotypy. This suggests auditory imagery, specifically the mind's ear, is a primary driver of hallucination propensity.
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.
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.
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.
Scholz and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that aphantasics activate sensory precursors that lack the perceptual geometry of true imagery. This suggests aphantasia is a failure of multi-stage integration rather than just a lack of neural reactivation.
Sulfaro, Robinson and Carlson · Neuroscience of Consciousness
Researchers found that sensory input competes with mental imagery in a hierarchical neural network, preventing thoughts from dominating low-level sensory regions. This explains why mental imagery feels less vivid than real perception and how aphantasia arises from overweighted bottom-up signals.
Holmes and colleagues · Behaviour Research and Therapy
Researchers propose that mental imagery acts as an emotional amplifier in bipolar disorder, fueling mood volatility and anxiety. This suggests targeting imagery could improve cognitive behavioral treatments for the disorder.
Kronemer and colleagues · Neuroscience of Consciousness
Researchers found that visual imagery vividness positively correlates with the contrast and sharpness of negative afterimages. This suggests that afterimages and mental imagery may share top-down neural mechanisms in the brain.
Suggate and Martzog · Developmental Science
Increased screen-time in children is linked to lower mental imagery accuracy across both visual and haptic domains. This suggests that ready-made digital images may suppress the development of active mental image generation.
Kwok and colleagues · Psychological Science
Suppressed visual thoughts form sensory traces in the early visual cortex even when individuals report successful suppression. This provides an objective way to measure how nonconscious representations trigger thought-control failure.
Kjaer and colleagues · Cognitive Brain Research
Yoga Nidra meditation significantly increases endogenous dopamine release in the ventral striatum. This provides the first in vivo evidence that neurotransmitter regulation at the synaptic level can drive changes in conscious states.
Rademaker and Pearson · Frontiers in Psychology
Researchers found that five days of mental imagery training improved participants' metacognitive accuracy but did not increase imagery strength. This suggests that introspective ability and imagery production rely on distinct neural mechanisms.
Marks · British Journal of Psychology
Subjects reporting vivid visual imagery were significantly more accurate in recalling pictorial details than those with poor imagery. This provides evidence that visual images play a functional role in facilitating human memory.
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.
Cleary and colleagues · Neurocase
Researchers found that a 16-year-old with HSAM exhibited typical visual imagery vividness but significantly higher rates of involuntary memories. This suggests that superior memory may be driven by retrieval frequency rather than imagery ability.
Deery · Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
Researchers propose that mental imagery is a modulation of bodily orientation rather than a neural simulation. This suggests aphantasia is a specific inability to willfully conjure sensory-like presence through this bodily imagination.
Loo and Buchsbaum · Consciousness and Cognition
Aphantasic individuals showed a greater accuracy drop than controls when backward masking disrupted visual pattern completion. This suggests that aphantasia involves weakened recurrent neural processing that affects both imagery and perception.