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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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.
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.
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.
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.
Carrasco and Ridout · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
In two experiments with US students, one group smelled pairs of 16 everyday scratch-and-sniff odors, such as chocolate and leather, and rated how similar they were, while another group heard only the names and rated how similar the imagined smells were. Maps of both sets of ratings shared main dimensions such as fruitiness, strength and familiarity, which the authors take as evidence that people can imagine smells. The imagined map was looser than the real one, and the authors question how close the link is, though they argue that knowledge about the objects cannot fully explain the match.