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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Ravindren, R and Veedu · Discover Neuroscience
A 55-year-old woman had believed since age 29 that her mind had disappeared, a delusion of the kind seen in Cotard's syndrome. She reported no voluntary imagery in any sense, though she had visual dreams about once a month, and scans showed white matter damage in the frontal and parietal lobes on both sides. The authors suggest this damage disrupted her voluntary imagery and her ability to make sense of that loss, so she took it for losing her mind. It is a single case, and the report has no measure of her imagery before the illness.
Lebron Flores and Moacdieh · International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation
Students shown an AI-generated website before designing their own rated the experience lower, and for them imagery vividness did not predict how they felt about it. The authors say AI inspiration should be used with caution.
Liu · Neuropsychologia
A theory paper proposes that conscious imagery passes through three attention-driven stages: generation, integration and amplification. In this still-untested model, aphantasia spares generation but impairs integration and amplification.
Kvamme and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Among people with aphantasia, those with more (though still weak) imagery reported more alexithymia and anxiety, the reverse of typical imagers. The authors suggest faint imagery may prompt emotional processing that fails.
Rollo and colleagues · Brain and Cognition
In 49 healthy young adults, 20 minutes of weak, randomly fluctuating electrical current over both temples lowered ratings of how easily they could change one imagined sound into another, compared with a sham session on another day. Ratings of how vivid the imagined sounds were fell by a slightly smaller amount, a trend that did not reach significance. The ratings were self-reported during stimulation, and because no other brain area was stimulated for comparison, the authors cannot rule out a general effect, for example on attention.
Kutsche and colleagues · Cortex
Lesions causing aphantasia are all functionally connected to a specific region in the left ventral visual pathway called the fusiform imagery node. This provides causal evidence that this node's connections are key for voluntary visual imagery.
Gardner, Saurels and Arnold · Cortex
Researchers found that while imagining dark versus bright scenes modulates the pupillary response, this physiological change does not correlate with subjective imagery vividness ratings. This suggests pupillometry is not a reliable objective index for individual differences in imagery strength.
Zeman and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Replying to a proposal that aphantasia reflects broken mental "rendering," this letter argues that conscious object imagery is unlikely to be a useless by-product. Links with memory, empathy and emotion suggest it may support social life.
Balaban and Ullman · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
This short letter replies to a proposal that visual imagery, which it treats as the mind's "graphical rendering", plays a central role in social life. It agrees imagery may matter socially but doubts a direct link. Instead it suggests an indirect one: pictures, seen or imagined, may stir old emotional systems that words cannot trigger, which could explain why people with aphantasia react less to written descriptions of distressing events. It still argues that rendering is probably not crucial and that much of imagination's work is done by simulating how things physically behave rather than by making pictures.
Kvamme and colleagues · Heliyon
In 591 young adults, more vivid imagery went with an inward-focused style: attention to body signals, mindfulness, and openness. In statistical models, imagery related to mental health only through this style, partly through lower alexithymia.
Yavuz and Nazir · Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
In 158 English-speaking adults, how vividly people said they could picture things was not linked to the size of their vocabulary overall. Word by word, people with more vivid imagery did slightly worse on the most concrete words, such as tweezers or octopus, and in an exploratory comparison the 24 people with the weakest imagery scored higher than the 24 with the most vivid, about 82 against 76 out of 100. The authors suggest people with weak imagery may lean on word-based definitions, and call the findings provisional until they are repeated.
Chen and colleagues · Empirical Studies of the Arts
In a preregistered study, 45 Chinese university students viewed paintings in a virtual reality museum, sometimes told to imagine being inside each painting with as many senses as possible and sometimes told simply to appreciate them without imagining. Imagining with several senses made paintings feel more vivid, more arousing and more appealing, and students with stronger imagery across the senses rated paintings as more vivid and appealing overall. Vividness statistically accounted for both links with appeal, and arousal also did for the instruction. The authors suggest multisensory imagery practice could become part of art education.
Hubbard · Auditory Perception & Cognition
This review questions the usual line between the mind's ear (imagining outside sounds) and the inner voice (imagining one's own voice), which holds that only the inner voice carries movement information. Brain and muscle studies find movement-related activity when people imagine melodies and instrument sounds too, so the review argues that line does not hold. It suggests widening the inner voice to any sound a person makes, and separating the two by whether a sound is mapped to meaning or to action. It also asks whether someone without auditory imagery could keep its movement side.
Pepin and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Involuntary mental imagery is more frequent and vivid than hallucinations, though both share similar phenomenological traits. This suggests these inner experiences exist on a continuum rather than being entirely distinct phenomena.
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.