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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Murphy and colleagues · Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Across six studies, the authors built a 21-item questionnaire on how accurately people believe they sense signals from their body, such as hunger, heartbeat or the need to use the toilet. Scores were stable over a month and went with scores on an older questionnaire on the same theme, but were unrelated to how much attention people said they pay to their body. In two small studies, higher scores went with modestly better counting of one's own heartbeats. The authors read this as support for treating self-rated attention to the body and self-rated accuracy as separate traits.
Pearson · Nature Reviews Neuroscience
A review of the brain science of visual imagery as it stood in 2019. It describes imagery as a top-down process running from frontal areas back to the visual cortex, acting much like a weak form of seeing, and links stronger imagery to a smaller primary visual cortex and to less background activity there. On aphantasia, it notes that people with it show little sign of imagery on an objective test, rate their spatial imagery slightly higher than others, and often report imagery in dreams. Among the open questions it lists is whether any training can strengthen imagery.
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.
Brons · Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science
Aphantasics and those with SDAM retain personal and affective memories despite lacking the ability to re-experience the past through mental imagery. This suggests episodic memory is a composite of independent modules rather than a single unified faculty.
Renner and colleagues · Behaviour Research and Therapy
Mental imagery of future activities increases motivation and anticipated reward for those tasks. This suggests that simulating positive future events can act as a motivational amplifier to help people overcome procrastination.
Mehling and colleagues · PLOS ONE
The authors added five items to a 32-item questionnaire about awareness of body sensations, the MAIA, making the 37-item MAIA-2, and tested it with 1,090 adult visitors to the Science Museum in London. The eight-part structure held. The part about distracting oneself from discomfort became clearly more reliable, while the part about worrying over discomfort improved only against some earlier samples. Two parts still fall slightly short of the usual standard, and the questionnaire relies on self-report, with no objective measure to check it against.
Luke · Journal of Psychedelic Studies
A man with apparently lifelong aphantasia saw no mental images despite reportedly using DMT over 1,000 times, unlike a man whose imagery improved after ayahuasca. The author proposes that aphantasia present from birth may resist change.
dos Santos and colleagues · Journal of Psychedelic Studies
A man with long-standing aphantasia reported a faint but lasting gain in mental imagery after one ayahuasca ceremony, though LSD and psilocybin had not helped him. The authors suggest the drug, the emotional setting or both may explain it.
Alderson-Day and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Researchers developed a revised inner speech questionnaire identifying five distinct dimensions, including a new positive-regulatory factor. This provides a more nuanced tool for linking specific internal verbal experiences to various psychopathological traits.
Preece and colleagues · Personality and Individual Differences
Researchers built a 24-item questionnaire for alexithymia, difficulty attending to, recognizing and putting words to one's own feelings, with separate scores for bad and good feelings. In two online surveys of Australian adults (231 and 748 people), its scores held together well and rose with depression, anxiety and stress, and people reported more trouble with bad feelings than good ones. The paper did not test it in clinical groups or check whether scores stay stable over time.
Fulford and colleagues · Cortex
Low-vividness imagers activate a more widespread set of brain regions during visualization than high-vividness imagers. This suggests that individuals with weak mental imagery may use compensatory neural effort to perform imagery tasks.
Keogh and Pearson · Cortex
People with aphantasia showed almost no sign of imagery on an objective vision test, yet rated their spatial imagery as high as a comparison group did. This suggests aphantasia reflects a lack of sensory imagery rather than poor self-insight.
Watkins · Cortex
A physicist who lacks both visual imagery and the ability to relive his past describes how he discovered these differences. He suggests the two are linked but not identical, since not everyone with aphantasia has memory problems.
Jacobs, Schwarzkopf and Silvanto · Cortex
A woman with lifelong aphantasia was compared with 11 women with typical imagery on memory tests. She was as accurate as them on a task meant to need imagery, judging whether a dot fell inside a shape that was named but not shown, though she was worse than IQ-matched controls at telling her right answers from her wrong ones. She did worse only on the hardest trials of a matching visual memory task. The authors suggest she uses other strategies that work in most conditions but lose out when fine visual detail is needed; this is a single case.
Slofstra and colleagues · Cognition and Emotion
Higher levels of visual mental imagery in daily life were associated with better mood and more positive affect, regardless of the imagery's valence. This suggests that spontaneous imagery-based processing may play a protective role in emotional well-being.
Palombo, Sheldon and Levine · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Autobiographical memory varies significantly across individuals, ranging from highly superior to severely deficient capacities. This suggests that memory is a trait-like profile driven by distinct neural connectivity and cognitive strategies.
Cumming and Eaves · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
Mental imagery is a multidimensional process involving image generation, inspection, transformation, and maintenance. Understanding these distinct components allows for more precise measurement and application of imagery in sport and health settings.
Cabrera and colleagues · International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research
Researchers tested a short form of the Body Perception Questionnaire, which asks how often people notice body sensations and have organ reactions such as indigestion, in 1,320 people from online samples in Spain and the US and a US college class. Body awareness formed one factor, while bodily reactivity split into organs above and below the diaphragm, and the scales were reliable and related as expected to other questionnaires. Women and people reporting a psychiatric diagnosis scored higher. Because every measure was self-report, the authors say links to actual nervous system activity still need testing.
Reeder · Vision Research
This review argues that conflicting results on how far images held in mind overlap with seeing, in the brain and in behavior, may largely come from differences between people: how vivid and precise their imagery is, the strategy they use, the size of their visual cortex, and their expertise with a class of objects. It notes that several studies linking vividness to brain activity tested only 8 to 11 people and cannot alone be taken as strong evidence. It urges researchers to measure these differences, ideally pairing questionnaires with objective tasks.
Seiler, Newman-Norlund and Monsma · Psychology of Sport and Exercise
Thirty-seven young women who rated their movement imagery as good or poor imagined a simple arm movement in a brain scanner, either feeling it, seeing it through their own eyes, or watching themselves from outside. Both groups used much the same brain network. In direct comparisons of each kind of imagery, the groups differed only when watching from outside, where good imagers showed more activity in motor areas and the cerebellum. The authors call the differences small, and the study's threshold was not corrected for the many brain areas tested.