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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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.
Anema and colleagues · Experimental Brain Research
Fifteen young adults imagined the feel or the sound of objects shown in pictures, then pressed a button as fast as they could to show whether a tap on a finger or a beep in an ear came from the left or right. Taps were answered faster after imagining touch than after imagining sound, and beeps faster after imagining sound than after imagining touch. Imagining slowed responses overall, so the benefit was relative: imagery slowed people less when it matched the sense being tested. The authors explain this mainly as the cost of shifting attention between senses.
Keogh and Pearson · PLoS ONE
In about 35 students, those whose imagery more strongly biased what they saw next in a binocular rivalry test were also more accurate at holding a pattern in memory, while imagery strength was unrelated to very brief visual memory. In a second group of 17, a bright background while holding or imagining a pattern hurt the memory and imagery of the 7 strong imagers but not of the weaker imagers, who still did the memory task well. The authors conclude that strong imagers use imagery to hold visual information and weak imagers rely on other strategies.
Pearson, Rademaker and Tong · Psychological Science
Subjective vividness ratings reliably predict an image's impact on subsequent perception. This suggests that individuals have accurate metacognitive insight into the sensory strength of their mental imagery.
Campos · Perceptual and Motor Skills
The VVIQ-RV and VVIQ-2 show high internal consistency and strong construct validity for measuring object mental imagery. This confirms both revised versions are equally valid psychometric tools for assessing individual differences in imagery vividness.
Kobayashi and colleagues · PLoS ONE
In a brain recording study of nine adults recalling the taste of foods named on a screen, the brain's taste area became active in seven people, and in five of them a frontal area became active first. When the foods were shown as pictures, the taste area was active in six people but the frontal area in only one. The authors take this as support for the idea that frontal areas start taste imagery by calling up taste memories.
Zeman and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
A man who suddenly lost his visual imagery still passed imagery and visual memory tests, but his brain worked differently when he tried to picture faces. This suggests imagery tasks can be done without the experience of seeing.
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.
Pearson, Clifford and Tong · Current Biology
Imagining a specific pattern can strongly bias which of two competing stimuli reach awareness during binocular rivalry. This demonstrates that mental imagery creates a short-term sensory trace that directly shapes subsequent conscious perception.
Grunert and colleagues · Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
Adding imagery rescripting helped 79% of PTSD patients who failed to improve with standard exposure. This suggests that active manipulation of mental imagery is necessary to resolve trauma-related emotions like anger and guilt.
Arntz, Tiesema and Kindt · Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
Adding imagery rescripting to imaginal exposure significantly improved anger control and reduced guilt in PTSD patients compared to exposure alone. This suggests that active modification of mental imagery is more effective than simple exposure for treating trauma-related emotions.
Cui and colleagues · Vision Research
In eight adults, those who rated their visual imagery as more vivid showed more activity in early visual cortex, relative to the rest of the brain, while imagining people exercising in a brain scanner. They were also worse at identifying a briefly flashed color word when the background matched the color the word named. The authors propose both as objective measures of how vivid someone's imagery is, though the links come from only eight people.
Lotze and Halsband · Journal of Physiology-Paris
This review of motor imagery, imagining a movement without making it, finds that imagined and real movements use many of the same brain areas, with imagery relying most on premotor and supplementary motor areas and less on the primary motor cortex. Mental practice improves strength and skill, though less than physical practice, and works best alongside it; in stroke rehabilitation it was still mostly a research tool, used with selected patients who had few cognitive problems and high imagery scores. The authors stress that researchers cannot fully check what people do when they imagine.
Sadoski · Reading & Writing Quarterly
This review applies dual coding theory, the idea that we think in two linked codes, one of words and one of mental images, to how children and adults learn vocabulary. It reports that concrete, easily pictured words are learned faster than abstract ones, and that self-made drawings, illustrations and the keyword method, which links a new word to a sound-alike word in one image, help people learn meanings. Verbal methods such as word-part analysis also help. The review argues that the theory can account for why these methods work, but it does not consider people who cannot form images.
Stevenson and Case · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
This review asks whether people can imagine smells. Reports from hallucinations, dreams and questionnaires suggest smell images do occur, but people rate smell the hardest sense to imagine, and many lab results could come from knowledge or words rather than images; only one study ruled out every alternative. The authors argue that the main problem is calling up a smell from its name, since links between words and smells are weak, and predict that training people to link odors with names or other cues would make smell images easier to form.
Kobayashi and colleagues · NeuroImage
In a brain scanning study of 25 young adults, tasting fruit juice and imagining tastes both activated part of the insula, the brain's main taste area. Imagined taste activity sat mostly on the left side, while real taste activated both sides. Frontal areas appeared active whether people imagined tastes or pictured foods, so the authors suggest these areas start imagery in any sense. People who rated their taste imagery as weak were left out of the analysis.
Rauch and colleagues · Journal of Traumatic Stress
In exposure therapy for PTSD, distress while reliving the trauma fell steeply and image vividness fell slightly; only the drop in distress tracked recovery. This suggests recovery depends more on a memory becoming less frightening than less vivid.
Yoo and colleagues · NeuroReport
Tactile imagery activates primary and secondary somatosensory areas that partially overlap with regions used during actual touch perception. This suggests that mental rehearsal of physical sensations shares common neural substrates with real sensory experiences.
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.
Faw · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Researchers distinguished between objective imagery performance and subjective conscious experience. This explains how non-imagers can successfully process visual information despite lacking a mind's eye.