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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Keogh and Pearson · Cognition
In small laboratory experiments using a binocular rivalry test, people imagining several colored gratings at once produced weaker and less precise images with each item added, most sharply from one to two items, and their vividness ratings fell in step. Longer imagining time did not help, and a bright background weakened the images. The authors propose the limit comes partly from competition for space in early visual cortex; each experiment had 4 to 15 people, and some left out people with weak imagery.
Sheldon, Amaral and Levine · Memory
Thirty-five young adults watched short everyday video clips and then answered true or false questions while looking either at flickering visual noise, which disrupts imagery, or at a plain gray screen. The noise made no difference overall, but the higher people rated their spatial imagery, the more accuracy they lost under noise on questions about what happened and where, though not about object details; object imagery ratings did not predict this loss. The authors suggest strong spatial imagers lean on imagery to rebuild events, while weaker spatial imagers may rely on other routes, such as verbal knowledge.
Maxwell, Lynn and Lilienfeld · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
In 275 undergraduates, those who said they used imagery less, or preferred visual thinking less, scored somewhat higher on self-reported psychopathic traits such as coldheartedness and somewhat lower on empathy, and more vivid imagery went with fewer difficulties regulating emotion. The links were small, and imagery mostly stopped predicting psychopathic traits and emotion regulation problems once broad personality traits were taken into account. The authors call the findings preliminary and note the survey cannot show which way any effect runs.
Grol, Vingerhoets and De Raedt · Brain and Cognition
Twenty-seven young women recalled happy and neutral memories in an MRI scanner, picturing each either through their own eyes or as an onlooker watching themselves. Happy memories pictured through their own eyes left them slightly happier than when pictured as an onlooker. Picturing as an onlooker went with relatively more activity in the right precuneus and right temporoparietal junction, at a lenient statistical threshold, and no area was more active for the own-eyes view; the authors link the difference to shifting viewpoint, judging oneself and spatial processing.
Berger and Ehrsson · Scientific Reports
Imagining collision-like sounds can cause people to perceive crossing discs as bouncing, with the effect's strength tied to imagery vividness. This demonstrates that mental imagery can integrate with real sensory input to alter our perception.
MacKisack and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
The paper traces the long philosophical history of mental imagery, from Aristotelian "phantasma" to behaviorist skepticism. This historical context reveals that modern neuroscientific debates over imagery's role in cognition are rooted in centuries of conflicting intellectual traditions.
Jung, Flores and Hunter · Frontiers in Psychology
Eighty young adults spent about two weeks on an online task, writing down goals, imagined scenes and inventions over four sessions and then rating their engagement, satisfaction and progress; those ten ratings make up the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire. Higher scores went with a larger hippocampus and lingual gyrus and a smaller nucleus accumbens and parts of the default mode network, but not with overall creative achievement. The questionnaire asks how people felt about their own ideas and the task rather than measuring imagery, and the brain links are exploratory.
Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala · Cortex
In a short reply to colleagues who suggested some aphantasia may be psychological in origin, the authors agree that mood and other psychological factors can change imagery and should be assessed, but call the old split between psychological and physical causes dubious, since both act through the brain. The 21 people with lifelong aphantasia from their earlier questionnaire study, most of whom still had imagery in dreams or brief flashes, described a stable difference with few emotional effects, so the authors doubt that psychological problems play a major role in lifelong aphantasia.
de Vito and Bartolomeo · Cortex
Researchers suggest that aphantasia can have psychogenic origins linked to conditions like anxiety and depersonalization. This indicates that clinical evaluations of imagery loss should include psychopathological examinations.
Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala · Cortex
Of 21 people with lifelong weak or absent voluntary imagery, most still had involuntary images, as brief flashes or in dreams. The authors named this aphantasia and suspect it is a variation in brain function, akin to synesthesia.
Pearson and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
This review argues that visual imagery works like a weak form of seeing, with brain activity resembling perception's as early as the primary visual cortex. It also covers intrusive imagery in disorders such as PTSD and imagery-based therapy.
Palombo and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Three healthy adults who cannot relive past events scored normally on most memory tests but poorly when recalling visual details. The authors suggest the problem lies in handling visual information within memory for one's own life.
Pearson and Westbrook · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Researchers propose a dichotomous framework for phantom perception, distinguishing between voluntary mental imagery and involuntary experiences like illusions or synesthesia. This classification helps unify diverse sensory phenomena and provides a roadmap for studying the neural mechanisms of constructive perception.
Andrade and colleagues · British Journal of Psychology
A new questionnaire on imagery in seven senses found a separate vividness factor for each sense rather than one general factor, though the senses correlate. Relative to their own average, most people were stronger in some senses than others.
Schmidt, Ostwald and Blankenburg · NeuroImage
In a brain scanning study of 14 adults, imagining a learned vibration pattern on the fingertip activated the touch area of the brain that responds to feeling it, though the overlap with real touch was clear only at a lenient threshold. Imagining also engaged regions tied to memory and imagination, and a frontal region became more strongly coupled with the touch area. The authors read this as the brain building an abstract image and then adding sensory detail from early sensory areas.
Pearson · Current Directions in Psychological Science
A short review of two newer ways to study mental imagery: reading imagined content from brain scans, and a test in which imagining one of two patterns makes it more likely to be seen when each eye sees a different pattern. On that test, imagery acts like weak seeing: bright light weakens it, it matches the imagined position and orientation, and people can tell which of their images were strong. Imagery strength stayed the same over five days of hour-long practice, and strong imagers seem to use imagery for short-term visual memory while people without it use other strategies.
Laeng and Sulutvedt · Psychological Science
Pupils narrowed when people imagined bright shapes or scenes and widened for dark ones, even while they looked at a plain gray screen. The authors conclude that mental images carry the brightness of the original perception.
Nelis and colleagues · Psychologica Belgica
The authors translated a 12-item questionnaire about how often people use mental pictures in daily life, the Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale, into Dutch and tested it with 1,297 people, most of them psychology students in Leuven, Belgium. It measured one general tendency with acceptable reliability, and scores were only moderately related to how vivid people said their imagery was, so frequency and vividness are linked but not the same. Three items worked poorly, and about 2% of people said they never had images in more than half of the situations described.
Palombo and colleagues · Cortex
The authors built a self-report questionnaire about everyday memory for one's own life, the Survey of Autobiographical Memory, and tested it with 598 healthy adults in Toronto. Answers grouped into general good-or-poor memory factors plus separate factors for finding one's way and for imagining the future; memory for events and memory for facts did not separate, though the authors kept them as separate scores. People reporting past depression rated their memory for events lower, men rated their sense of direction higher, and scores related modestly to some laboratory memory tests. Shorter 26-item and 10-item versions are offered.
Arshamian and Larsson · Frontiers in Psychology
This short review compares imagining smells with imagining sights and sounds. In many studies smell imagery behaves like the others, but people differ far more in it, and most find it hard to call up a smell. The authors link stronger smell imagery to knowing odor names, interest in smells, and experience such as daily cooking or perfumery, and suggest regular exposure to smells may help. Most of this evidence compares experienced people with novices at one point in time, so it cannot show that practice caused the difference.