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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Esselaar and colleagues · Brain Communications
Individuals with aphantasia do not show increased corticospinal excitability during motor imagery or action observation. This suggests that aphantasia may involve a neurophysiological inability to simulate actions rather than a metacognitive deficit.
Dupont and colleagues · Brain Communications
Aphantasics showed no increase in motor system excitability during motor imagery or action observation tasks. This suggests aphantasia involves a physiological impairment in motor simulation rather than just a deficit in metacognition.
Speed, Eekhof and Mak · Consciousness and Cognition
Readers with aphantasia felt less absorbed in a short story and less sympathy for its characters, yet liked it as much as other readers. This suggests mental imagery shapes how a story is experienced but is not the only route to enjoying one.
Sulfaro, Robinson and Carlson · Consciousness and Cognition
In an online survey of 242 Sydney psychology students, people described how they see and hear the letter O in their mind. Imagined sounds started sooner, lasted longer, held steadier and came more automatically than imagined images, while images were easier to place in space and were reported more often with the eyes closed. More than half the students reported no visual image at least once during the survey, and the authors argue that imagery is unstable for many people and hard to measure by self-report.
Hashim and colleagues · Music & Science
People with aphantasia felt slightly less intense emotion to film music and reported fewer music-evoked memories, yet enjoyed music as much as others. The authors suggest imagery may deepen musical emotion but is not needed to enjoy music.
Schwarzkopf · Cortex
This opinion piece suggests that imagery may differ not only in vividness but in where it is experienced: some people may see images placed in the world in front of them, while others have clear images that feel "inside" or "off-screen" rather than in view. It calls the evidence for these types anecdotal so far, and allows that a single vividness scale might still explain them. It argues that vividness questionnaires are too vague and may wrongly class some people as aphantasic, and calls for tasks that measure the detail of imagery more directly.
Monzel, Karneboge and Reuter · Journal of Neuroscience Research
Researchers are investigating whether transiently reducing dopamine synthesis through an amino acid mixture decreases the strength of voluntary mental imagery. This study could reveal the neurochemical basis of aphantasia and identify potential targets for imagery-enhancing interventions.
Monzel and Reuter · Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
In an online test, people with aphantasia took longer than controls to find objects in busy hidden-object pictures (8.95 versus 7.46 seconds), though no one was asked to visualize. More vivid imagery went with faster search.
Dupont and colleagues · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Aphantasics showed no increase in motor cortex excitability while reading action sentences, unlike those with typical imagery. This suggests that mental imagery is a necessary component for the motor simulation of language.
Cabbai and colleagues · Cortex
A dot matching the color of a searched-for object pulled attention as strongly in 91 people with aphantasia as in 231 without, and imagery vividness made no difference. None of the aphantasic group reported using imagery to search.
Dietz and colleagues · Cognitive Neuropsychology
Patients with posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) show significant deficits across most visual imagery categories, though imagery for lower-case letters is often spared. This suggests imagery impairment could be a core diagnostic feature of PCA.
Pace, Koenig-Robert and Pearson · Psychological Science
Mental imagery reversed the suppressive effects of visual adaptation, unlike weak perception which increased them. This suggests that imagery and perception rely on different neural mechanisms, with imagery likely acting through inhibitory modulation.
Marks · Vision
Researchers synthesized historical and contemporary data to create a 16-descriptor template for visual mental imagery. This provides a normative standard to better understand individual differences in imagery vividness and clinical conditions.
Dance, Hole and Simner · Cortex
Aphantasics performed worse on face recognition tasks but were just as accurate as controls at constructing face composites from memory. This suggests that while visual imagery facilitates face recognition, it is not required for accurate face recall.
Dando and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Eyewitnesses with aphantasia recalled fewer correct details of a filmed crime than typical imagers but made no more errors. They recalled least when asked to picture the scene, which suggests imagery-based interviews may not suit them.
Monzel and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia performed no differently from others on a memory task but felt less confident, and imagery was not linked to school grades. The authors argue aphantasia is neutral neurodivergence and a disorder label may do harm.
Liu and Bartolomeo · Cortex
People with aphantasia were as accurate as typical and vivid imagers on imagery and perception tasks, but slower. The authors suggest visual knowledge is still reached without a conscious image, or through other strategies.
Bergmann and Ortiz-Tudela · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Researchers propose that aphantasia stems from specific deficits in high-level feedback signals along the visual "what" stream during memory retrieval. This suggests that memory impairments in aphantasia are tied to the inability to reinstate precise object features rather than a general episodic memory failure.
Monzel and colleagues · Perception
People with aphantasia performed worse than controls on both face and object recognition tasks. This suggests that a lack of mental imagery may lead to broader visual recognition deficits beyond just faces.
Monzel and colleagues · Psychophysiology
This is the published plan for a study, accepted before data collection, so it reports no results. It set out to test whether people need to picture a feared object for their fear to fade while they imagine it, comparing 30 people with aphantasia, 30 typical imagers with eyes closed and 30 typical imagers staring at a bright screen to dampen their imagery. Fear was to be measured through skin responses after people learned to link one of two pictures with an electric shock. A separate 2025 paper reported the results: the fear faded in all three groups.