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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Knight, Milton and Zeman · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasics showed normal visual working memory performance and decodable neural representations in the visual cortex. This suggests aphantasia is a lack of conscious awareness rather than an inability to generate or store visual information.
Sulfaro · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Researchers discovered that aphantasia and vividness judgements are compromised by poorly defined references for typical imagery. This indicates that current measures like the VVIQ may be invalid and misleading.
Panigutti and colleagues · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
This systematic review found only 11 studies on imagery and hallucinations in Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and schizophrenia, and none in Lewy body dementia. Seven reported a link and four did not, so the evidence is indecisive.
Lambert and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that anauralia and aphantasia share a 0.8% prevalence but have distinct psychological profiles. This suggests that the absence of sensory imagery is modality-specific rather than a single, unified condition.
Fleming and Dijkstra · Cell Research
Researchers discovered that mental imagery reactivates the same sensory code as perception at the single-neuron level. This suggests that aphantasia may stem from how this shared activity is generated, modulated, or read out by the brain.
Ernst, Kronbichler and Meyer · Scientific Reports
In an online study of 156 young adults judging one trolley dilemma each, those who said afterwards they had pictured the footbridge version as an onlooker more often called pushing the man acceptable (33% against 12% of those who pictured it through their own eyes). There was no such link for the lever version or for willingness to act, and vividness showed no clear effect. More than one in five said they used no visual imagery when judging acceptability. Because people reported their viewpoint after deciding, the authors cannot say whether it shaped the judgment or was reconstructed afterwards.
Calzavarini · Synthese
This philosophy paper argues that mental imagery should not be sorted mainly by sense, such as visual or auditory. It reviews brain studies, many in blind and deaf people, showing that areas long thought to be visual or auditory handle properties such as shape, motion or rhythm whichever sense the information comes from. It suggests describing imagery by these properties instead, and proposes testing people with aphantasia, especially those who lack imagery across several senses, on shape, rhythm or motion imagery. The paper calls this evidence substantial but not conclusive.
Bartolomeo · Annual Review of Vision Science
Congenital aphantasia likely stems from impaired access to intact visual representations rather than a total lack of mental content. This suggests conscious visualization is an emergent property of large-scale network coordination.
Delhaye and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia remembered which color went with which shape as well as typical imagers, even for hard-to-name shapes. The authors conclude that neither imagery nor verbal labels is necessary for this kind of memory.
New and colleagues · Cortex
Aphantasia is linked to higher rates of neurodevelopmental, neurological, and psychiatric disorders compared to typical imagery. This highlights the need for multisensory evaluations and tailored interventions for neurodiverse profiles.
Yan, Roberts and Bainbridge · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasic individuals showed a robust picture superiority effect and recalled symbols better than pictures. This challenges dual-coding theory by demonstrating that visual imagery is not essential for the memory advantages of image-based stimuli.
Li and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In a phone navigation game, 63 people with aphantasia were slower than others on complex levels, with no clear gap on simple ones, and rated their own sense of direction lower. The authors suggest picturing a map helps most when there is a lot to remember.
Scholz and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that aphantasics activate sensory precursors that lack the perceptual geometry of true imagery. This suggests aphantasia is a failure of multi-stage integration rather than just a lack of neural reactivation.
Martin and colleagues · Learning and Individual Differences
Among 1,451 high school students, weaker imagery went with lower science scores, a gap that was smaller where students said teachers reduced mental load. The authors suggest such teaching may help weak imagers, but the data cannot show cause.
Moskoff · University of Colorado Honors Journal
In an undergraduate thesis, 12 people with aphantasia and 27 with imagery, recruited online through aphantasia forums, judged short sentences such as "buses can be yellow" as true or false. Neither group slowed down when switching from a sentence about appearance to one about movement, so the effect the study set out to find did not appear. The aphantasia group answered faster overall, but the groups were small and most of the aphantasia group reported ADHD or autism, so the author cautions that the gap may not be due to imagery.
Koenig-Robert, Pace and Pearson · Psychological Review
Researchers propose that imagery reshapes spontaneous neural activity via inhibitory feedback rather than driving new spikes in early visual areas. This suggests the spectrum from aphantasia to hyperphantasia is driven by the strength of cortical inhibition.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
People with aphantasia recalled fewer letters than others from a grid flashed for 50 milliseconds, but not from one shown for 5 seconds. This suggests imagery helps hold a split-second visual trace, while other strategies work given more time.
Duckett and Simons · Neuropsychologia
In 60 adults, neither questionnaire imagery scores nor average vividness predicted memory for scenes, but memories rated more vivid than a person's own average were more often correct. Re-analyzed aphantasia data showed the same trial-level link.
Le Clézio and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In an online reasoning task, 57 typical imagers were about 2.4 seconds slower on problems built on visual relations, such as cleaner or dirtier, than on spatial problems or ones that are hard to picture, repeating an earlier finding that visual content can slow reasoning. The 47 people with weak or no imagery were also slower on visual problems, by about 1.7 seconds, but less clearly, and whether the two groups truly differed was unclear. Accuracy did not clearly differ between groups.
McVay and Mooring · Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education
In interviews with ten biochemistry students and two instructors at one US university, students mostly described visualization as drawn structures, pathways and reaction mechanisms, while instructors meant picturing molecules in the mind. Two students said they had aphantasia and described workarounds, such as reasoning in words or writing out memorized structures just before exams; one reported no improvement in picturing but had not tried any exercises. The authors suggest instructors teach several ways to do visual tasks and be clearer about the representations they use and why they matter.