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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Noble and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In brain scans of 58 people, more vivid imagery was weakly linked to more complex activity in the lower temporal lobes, and not only while imagining. The authors speculate that excess neural noise may underlie aphantasia.
Peruski · Journal of Neurophysiology
Aphantasics showed reduced right-brain activation and increased left middle frontal gyrus activity during motor imagery. This suggests they use compensatory semantic strategies, indicating mental imagery is not essential for motor cognition.
Gao, Nagai and Silvanto · Neuropsychologia
People who lost their mental imagery reported more childhood trauma, anxiety, heart and breathing symptoms, and ADHD and autism traits than typical imagers. This suggests acquired aphantasia can follow emotional pathways as well as brain injury.
Hangai · Rhizomata
The paper studies how the ancient Aristotelian philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias treated phantasia, the power behind remembering, dreaming and imagining, as separate from perception. On this reading, a perception leaves a bodily residue that keeps its content after the object is gone, and that residue later triggers the experience. Errors, dreams and images of things that never existed, such as a winged horse, arise when a residue loses detail and phantasia fills the gap from other stored residues. The paper concerns ancient philosophy and does not discuss aphantasia.
Keogh and colleagues · Journal of Vision
Individuals with aphantasia reported experiencing the neon color spreading illusion less intensely than those with visual imagery. This suggests that visual imagery and the neon color illusion may share overlapping neural feedback mechanisms.
Wang and colleagues · Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Posters
A VR system using guided imagery and spatial tasks significantly improved imagery clarity and recall in people with imagery deficits. This suggests that leveraging preserved spatial cognition can help rebuild visual imagery pathways.
Scholz and Scholz · International Mad Studies Journal
Researchers found that biomedical and cognitive studies often frame aphantasia as a disorder or deficit, ignoring the lived experiences of aphantasics. This highlights the need for more inclusive research that avoids pathologizing neurodiversity.
Delem and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that individuals with aphantasia scored lower across all sensory imagery modalities but performed similarly to controls on spatial and cognitive tasks. This suggests that multisensory imagery deficits do not hinder general cognitive or spatial reasoning abilities.
Monzel, Nagai and Silvanto · Scientific Reports
People with aphantasia report significantly lower interceptive awareness and emotional engagement with bodily signals. This suggests that mental imagery plays a key role in linking internal bodily states to the recall of personal memories.
Wymark and colleagues · Journal of the Neurological Sciences
In this conference abstract, people with aphantasia, average imagers and very vivid imagers did a task that tests whether imagining something gets in the way of seeing it. The more vivid a group's imagery, the more imagining hurt accuracy, by about 9 percent in the vivid group, while the aphantasia group was slightly more accurate on imagery trials. Brain recordings also differed between the groups. The authors argue aphantasia is a different way of processing rather than a deficit, but the abstract does not say how many people took part.
Nanay · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Aphantasia is a heterogeneous condition with distinct subtypes, including variations in voluntary control and sensory modalities. Recognizing these differences is essential for developing accurate experimental methodologies and explanations.
Bartolomeo · Neuropsychologia
In a short conceptual paper, the author proposes sorting aphantasia into at least three forms: neurological, psychogenic and congenital. He offers it as an initial taxonomy for research that has reached contradictory conclusions.
Larner · Neuropsychologia
Historical reports of congenital and acquired aphantasia exist dating back to the late 19th century. This provides a sound epistemic basis for the retrospective diagnosis of aphantasia and supports its status as a transhistorical condition.
Lebon · Cortex
Individuals with aphantasia show decodable activity in early visual cortices during imagery tasks despite lacking conscious visual experience. This suggests that neural activation in V1 does not necessarily equate to subjective mental imagery.
Cavazos and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
Students with aphantasia did not differ from students with vivid imagery in broad study approaches, and described workarounds such as lists and talking things through. This suggests imagery helps some learners but is not needed to learn.
Hayes, Miles and Evans · New Ideas in Psychology
Five people with aphantasia described leaning on facts, a soundless inner voice, and notes, photos and other people to remember. The authors suggest these strategies help but only partly offset real memory difficulties.
Kwaśniak and colleagues · Scientific Reports
People with aphantasia showed reduced activation in the right middle frontal gyrus and right motor cortex during motor imagery tasks. This suggests that aphantasia involves differences in attentional switching and neural processing beyond just visual imagery.
Pounder and colleagues · Cogent Psychology
Six women living in the UK who could not form images at will were interviewed about life with aphantasia. Difficulties with recalling faces, reliving personal memories and finding their way came up most, though each woman described a different mix. All six reported images in dreams, some only rarely; several had sudden images at times of intense emotion or deep relaxation, and some felt their images were there but out of reach. All six said they could not imagine smells or tastes.
Nanay · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasia is not a monolithic condition but a heterogeneous spectrum with diverse underlying causes. Recognizing this complexity helps researchers better understand the interpersonal differences in imagery vividness across the entire population.
Dance, Meeten and Simner · Behaviour Research and Therapy
Aphantasics catastrophise less and feel less threatened by worries despite reporting similar overall anxiety levels as controls. This suggests that while mental imagery is not required for worry, it may amplify its perceived severity.