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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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.
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.
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.
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.
Wantzen and Witt · L’Année psychologique
Aphantasics reported less frequent use of autobiographical memory for identity and directive purposes than controls. This suggests that a lack of mental imagery may alter how individuals utilize their personal past to guide future behavior and self-concept.
Cavalli and Plancher · L’Année psychologique
Introducing a special issue, the editors call aphantasia multifaceted, with memory differences in some areas and preserved abilities in others. They suggest it invites cognitive science to build individual differences into models of the mind.
Bartolomeo and Arcangeli · Cortex
Researchers argue that congenital aphantasia is not "imagery blindsight" because individuals retain high-level accuracy and conscious access to information via non-visual routes. This suggests aphantasia involves a selective inability to format information into a quasi-visual experience.
Speed, Mak and McRae · Neuropsychologia
In two online experiments, 68 people with aphantasia and over 100 typical imagers read short sentences and judged whether a pictured object had been named. Both groups were slower when the picture's color clashed with the color the sentence implied (a dog hard to find in mud is likely brown), and the slowing was, if anything, larger in the aphantasia group. Neither group was affected by implied distance. The authors read this as automatic, unconscious simulation during reading that does not need conscious imagery, though they say other strategies still need ruling out.
Guillaume and Armand · L’Année psychologique
A 51-year-old man with lifelong aphantasia, who reported no visual or auditory imagery, was compared with seven matched men on two recognition tests. He recognized word and picture pairs as well as they did when the two items were related in meaning, but almost never when they were unrelated, calling nearly every unrelated pair new whether or not he had seen it. He also recognized fewer of the studied faces that showed fear. The authors suggest his memory works when it can lean on meaning and fails when it needs visual reconstruction, and caution that this is a single case.
Vanbuckhave and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Pupillometry showed that imagined brightness modulates pupil size, but these changes did not correlate with individual self-reported imagery vividness. This suggests a dissociation between subjective reports and objective physiological measures of imagery.
Silvanto · Cortex
A commentary argues that whether to treat aphantasia depends on subtype. Imagery lost after trauma or stress is the clearest candidate, with care aimed at underlying problems; lifelong absent imagery without impairment is variation, not pathology.
Lorenzatti · Neuropsychologia
This review tests four explanations of aphantasia against five brain imaging studies that compared aphantasic people with typical imagers. Because every study found brain differences, it rules out, as general explanations, the ideas that aphantasic people only describe their experience differently or fail to notice images they have. Of the two left, that image-like representations form but are hard to access, or that they never properly form, the second fits somewhat better, though much of its support depends on which model of how the brain makes images proves right.
Sabel and colleagues · Psychological Reports
Researchers compared hoarding symptoms in 58 people with aphantasia and 23 with unusually vivid imagery against matched typical imagers, allowing for age and depression. People with aphantasia reported no more hoarding symptoms than their matches, though they leaned more on objects as memory aids. People with very vivid imagery reported fewer hoarding symptoms and were less likely to live in cluttered homes. From this comparison of existing groups, the authors suggest that vivid imagery may protect against hoarding.
Suggate, Milton and Tree · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia were more accurate but slower than controls on multimodal mental comparison tasks. This suggests that sensory cognition can be successfully achieved through propositional rather than imagistic strategies.
Ravindren, R and Veedu · Discover Neuroscience
A 55-year-old woman had believed since age 29 that her mind had disappeared, a delusion of the kind seen in Cotard's syndrome. She reported no voluntary imagery in any sense, though she had visual dreams about once a month, and scans showed white matter damage in the frontal and parietal lobes on both sides. The authors suggest this damage disrupted her voluntary imagery and her ability to make sense of that loss, so she took it for losing her mind. It is a single case, and the report has no measure of her imagery before the illness.
Liu · Neuropsychologia
A theory paper proposes that conscious imagery passes through three attention-driven stages: generation, integration and amplification. In this still-untested model, aphantasia spares generation but impairs integration and amplification.
Kvamme and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Among people with aphantasia, those with more (though still weak) imagery reported more alexithymia and anxiety, the reverse of typical imagers. The authors suggest faint imagery may prompt emotional processing that fails.
Kutsche and colleagues · Cortex
Lesions causing aphantasia are all functionally connected to a specific region in the left ventral visual pathway called the fusiform imagery node. This provides causal evidence that this node's connections are key for voluntary visual imagery.
Zeman and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Replying to a proposal that aphantasia reflects broken mental "rendering," this letter argues that conscious object imagery is unlikely to be a useless by-product. Links with memory, empathy and emotion suggest it may support social life.
Chen and colleagues · Empirical Studies of the Arts
In a preregistered study, 45 Chinese university students viewed paintings in a virtual reality museum, sometimes told to imagine being inside each painting with as many senses as possible and sometimes told simply to appreciate them without imagining. Imagining with several senses made paintings feel more vivid, more arousing and more appealing, and students with stronger imagery across the senses rated paintings as more vivid and appealing overall. Vividness statistically accounted for both links with appeal, and arousal also did for the instruction. The authors suggest multisensory imagery practice could become part of art education.