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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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.
Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala · Cortex
In a short reply to colleagues who suggested some aphantasia may be psychological in origin, the authors agree that mood and other psychological factors can change imagery and should be assessed, but call the old split between psychological and physical causes dubious, since both act through the brain. The 21 people with lifelong aphantasia from their earlier questionnaire study, most of whom still had imagery in dreams or brief flashes, described a stable difference with few emotional effects, so the authors doubt that psychological problems play a major role in lifelong aphantasia.
de Vito and Bartolomeo · Cortex
Researchers suggest that aphantasia can have psychogenic origins linked to conditions like anxiety and depersonalization. This indicates that clinical evaluations of imagery loss should include psychopathological examinations.
Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala · Cortex
Of 21 people with lifelong weak or absent voluntary imagery, most still had involuntary images, as brief flashes or in dreams. The authors named this aphantasia and suspect it is a variation in brain function, akin to synesthesia.
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.