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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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.
Anderson and colleagues · Neuron
Mental imagery and perception overlap in transmodal association networks rather than unimodal sensory areas. This suggests that high-level brain systems, not just sensory reinstatement, are the primary drivers of mental imagery.
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 · Psychophysiology
Pupil size changes in response to imagined brightness reflected trial-level vividness but not stable trait imagery scores. This suggests pupillometry tracks temporary imagery intensity rather than serving as a marker for overall ability.
Schwarzkopf and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Vividness ratings robustly capture a wide range of subjective experiences, from internal mental depictions to externally projected imagery. This suggests aphantasia should be redefined to distinguish between faint imagery and a total lack of pictorial representation.
Redžepi and colleagues · Brain Sciences
Researchers found that visual imagery recruits ventral and dorsal streams, with deficits often caused by white-matter disconnection. This suggests aphantasia is a network-level condition where higher-order systems fail to engage visual representations.
Demas · Brain Sciences
Engineered pareidolia functions as externally scaffolded mental imagery where minimal visual cues recruit internal templates. This provides a quantifiable bridge between creative perception, imagination, and clinical neuropsychology.
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.
Tolman · Auditory Perception & Cognition
Three classically trained musicians who report no inner hearing, a pianist and two singers, were interviewed about how they learn and rehearse music. They described relying on the feel of their hands, voice and breath, on memory of the written score, on silent syllables or number codes, and on music theory, and none had noticed their lack of inner hearing when they began training. The author suggests inner hearing may not be needed for several kinds of musical reasoning and rehearsal, and that teaching should offer other routes, though the study rests on interviews and did not measure performance.
Silvanto · Frontiers in Psychology
Mental imagery likely evolved from interoceptive processing to provide affectively-grounded simulations for decision-making. This suggests that aphantasia may stem from a decoupling of sensory information and internal bodily signals.
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.
Tomastikova and Silson · Cortex
Researchers found that mental imagery of people, but not buildings, significantly primed subsequent perception in a binocular rivalry task. This suggests that the functional impact of imagery on perception is category-specific rather than a universal effect.
Taylor and colleagues · Scientific Reports
Researchers found no meaningful association between mental imagery vividness and sensory sensitivity, despite both correlating with autistic traits. This suggests that imagery and sensory processing may not share a common neural mechanism.
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.
Bartolomeo, Liu and Spagna · Neuropsychologia
The Fusiform Imagery Node (FIN) in the left hemisphere is a key hub for generating mental images across different domains. This suggests that aphantasia may result from impaired communication between the FIN and the prefrontal cortex.
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.