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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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Bainbridge and colleagues · Cortex
People with aphantasia drew fewer objects and less color from memory than typical imagers, but placed objects just as accurately and added fewer false ones. This suggests memory for objects and memory for locations rely on separate systems.
Dawes and colleagues · Scientific Reports
People with aphantasia reported weaker imagery in all senses, less vivid memories and imagined futures, and fewer dreams, but similar spatial skills. This suggests imagery is a common tool that many mental processes draw on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.