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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Wagner and Monzel · Brain and Behavior
Sixteen people with schizophrenia and 44 people without it rated their visual imagery and did a binocular rivalry test, in which a pattern someone has just imagined is more likely to dominate what they then see. The groups did not differ on either measure, although the people with schizophrenia reported far more hallucination-like experiences. Among the people with schizophrenia, more vivid self-rated imagery went with more religious-themed hallucinations. The sample was small, all patients were on medication, and the rivalry test was not very reliable.
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.
Muraki, Speed and Pexman · Nature Reviews Psychology
A review of whether understanding words relies on quietly replaying sights, sounds and movements in the brain, often called simulation, and what aphantasia could reveal about it. The authors suggest such simulation may be a kind of imagery that is involuntary and unconscious, and set out studies to test whether people without voluntary imagery still show its effects. They also summarize what was known in 2023 about aphantasia, including its estimated prevalence, the value of objective tests alongside questionnaires, and dream imagery in about 60% of people with it.
Prasad, Megla and Bainbridge · Journal of Vision
Aphantasics show significant neural overlap with typical imagers during memory recall despite reporting no visual imagery. This suggests that aphantasia may involve a disruption in conscious access to visual information rather than a total absence of it.
Beran and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Of 5,010 U.S. adults, 8.9% said they had no mental imagery, but only 1.5% scored in the aphantasia range on a standard questionnaire. This suggests estimates of how common aphantasia is depend on how it is measured.
Takahashi and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
In an online survey of 2,871 Japanese adults, 3.7% had low scores on a standard imagery questionnaire, but 12.1% said they could not, or could barely, picture things such as furniture or a friend's face, and the two groups overlapped poorly. A second survey of 774 adults suggested part of the gap comes from people with poor face recognition answering the face part of the question. Among those with low questionnaire scores, some reported weak imagery in every sense and others mainly in vision, so the authors recommend using several measures, including other senses.
Sulfaro, Robinson and Carlson
Researchers found that competition from real-world sensory input prevents mental images from becoming fully visible hallucinations. This suggests that the "quasi-sensory" nature of imagery is a direct result of perceptual interference.
Riley and Davies · Brain and Cognition
Researchers proposed that mental imagery vividness is determined by how closely a generated image matches a predictive model derived from beliefs and expectations. This suggests vividness is a relational property of internal consistency rather than a direct reflection of sensory-like detail.
Monzel, Vetterlein and Reuter · Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
Aphantasia met only the rarity criterion for a mental disorder: memory differences and distress were too mild on average. But about a third reported clinically relevant distress, so the authors advise assessing individual cases.
Blomkvist · Mind & Language
This philosophy paper reviews early studies of aphantasia and picks out six recurring findings: weak or absent voluntary visual imagery, uneven loss in the other senses, involuntary imagery such as dreams often less affected, fewer details in memories, fewer details when imagining general or future events, and intact spatial abilities. It argues that two earlier accounts cannot explain all six and proposes that aphantasia is a fault in how the memory system retrieves sensory details on demand, rather than a problem of vision alone. The theory makes predictions that have not yet been tested.
Monzel, Keidel and Reuter · Journal of Research in Personality
People with aphantasia scored lower on empathy when distressing scenes were described in words, but not when they were shown as photos. This suggests written empathy tests may partly measure imagery rather than empathy.
Dijkstra and Fleming · Nature Communications
The brain distinguishes reality from imagination based on whether intermixed sensory signals cross a strength threshold. This suggests that sufficiently vivid mental imagery can become subjectively indistinguishable from actual perception.
Keogh, Wicken and Pearson
People with aphantasia reported fewer intrusive memories after a distressing film, and theirs were mostly verbal rather than visual. The authors suggest visual imagery is tied to how often trauma memories intrude, which may matter for PTSD.
Lupyan and colleagues · Cognitive Science
People vary widely in their hidden internal experiences, often assuming their own subjective reality is universal. Studying these phenomenal differences helps researchers identify non-visual cognitive strategies and test the limits of universal psychological theories.
Wittmann and Şatırer · Learning & Memory
People with aphantasia remembered which items went together as accurately as others but were less often highly confident. This suggests imagery contributes to memory confidence rather than accuracy.
Cavedon-Taylor · Frontiers in Psychology
Aphantasia may primarily involve a lack of voluntary imagery while leaving involuntary imagery intact. This distinction suggests that aphantasics might still be susceptible to psychological disorders driven by intrusive, non-voluntary mental images.
Dawes and colleagues · Cognition
People with aphantasia described past and imagined future events with fewer event-specific details, mainly visual ones, especially for the future. This suggests visual imagery helps people rebuild events in rich detail.
Gulyás and colleagues · Cortex
Visual imagery vividness declines significantly from adolescence to middle age, with aphantasia prevalence increasing over time. This suggests that mental imagery strength is not a fixed trait but is influenced by age-related developmental factors.
Simner and Dance · Cortex
This reply to a call to use "aphantasia" for missing imagery in any sense defends the umbrella term "dysikonesia," with separate names for each sense, such as aphantasia for vision and anauralia for hearing. It points out that "aphantasia" was first used for visual imagery, warns from the history of synesthesia research that one name for different conditions can mislead studies, and notes that many people read "aphantasia" as an inability to fantasize. It accepts that "aphantasia" could be widened if the change in meaning is acknowledged, and that usage will settle over time.
Palermo and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In an online survey of 490 Italian adults, about 3% scored very low on a questionnaire's object imagery scale (pictures of things) and 3.5% on its spatial scale (layouts and rotation), with smaller groups at the high end. The low object group reported weak or missing images of faces, objects and events, yet still reported dream images; the low spatial group reported trouble mainly with mental rotation. Both low groups reported a poorer sense of direction, but neither differed reliably from controls on everyday memory or face recognition. Nearly all measures were self-report.