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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Mckilliam and Kirberg · Consciousness and Cognition
Researchers found that current evidence for unconscious mental imagery in aphantasia is inconclusive due to potential response biases and non-imagistic strategies. This highlights the need for objective physiological markers to distinguish between truly unconscious imagery and unreported conscious experiences.
Zeman · Neuropsychologia
Ten years after aphantasia was named, Adam Zeman argues it likely has several subtypes and that most abilities are spared, with memory for one's own past differing most. He urges an open mind in this young field.
Bruder and Zehra · Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
Among 636 adults in Qatar, 5.0% scored in the aphantasia range and 12.1% in the hyperphantasia range, similar across cultures. Middle East and North Africa participants reported weaker imagery than Southeast Asian and Western ones.
Cui, Kong and Zhang · Frontiers in Psychology
Aphantasic participants showed muted neural responses and minimal autonomic changes during romantic imagery compared to those with vivid imagery. This suggests that mental imagery is a crucial driver of physiological and emotional arousal.
McCormick and Lange · Frontiers in Cognition
This short review compares memory for personal events in aphantasia and in blindness. People with aphantasia recall fewer details of every kind and relive memories less, while the few small studies of blind people suggest their memories feel about as vivid as sighted people's, though they often need more prompting. The authors propose that building a mental scene matters more for vivid memory than having seen the world, and note that no study has yet tested scene building in people born blind.
Lam and colleagues · Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
In 72 Hong Kong adults with high social anxiety, five days of online training in reading ambiguous social situations as harmless rather than threatening reduced negative interpretations more than a neutral reading task. People who rated their imagery as more vivid, especially for imagined feelings, body sensations, touch and smell, gained the most, while visual imagery made no clear difference. The training did not lower social anxiety more than the control task, though in the training group, people with more vivid imagery overall reported larger drops in anxiety about social interaction.
Bahmani, Taghi Ghare-Bagh and Nazemzadegan · International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology
Forty-one novice university students, 21 with extremely vivid imagery and 20 with average imagery, fired a pistol at an electronic target with no instruction, with an instruction to keep their hand steady, and with an instruction to keep the gun steady. People with very vivid imagery kept the same accuracy under all three, while average imagers shot less accurately with either instruction than with none, and less accurately than vivid imagers when told to focus on their hand. The authors suggest vivid imagery may protect against unhelpful attention instructions, though the study had no group without imagery.
Monzel and colleagues · Behavior Research Methods
Using existing data from 111 people, 38 classed as having little or no imagery, the authors propose a new way to score a test in which imagining a colored pattern makes it more likely to be seen when each eye sees a different pattern. Counting trials where people saw a mix, instead of dropping them, made the score agree better with self-reported imagery, but only when few clear trials were recorded. The score explained about a tenth of the variation in self-reports, and the authors judge it better at separating groups than individuals and too weak to classify one person.
Pauly-Takacs and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia recalled and recognized word lists as well as others and were just as prone to false memories. This suggests aphantasia neither weakens verbal memory nor protects against verbal false memories.
Li and Guan · Journal of Emerging Investigators
In an online survey of 302 Canadian students aged 16 to 18, those who said they were fluent in two or more languages rated their visual imagery as more vivid, on average, than those fluent in one. Ten students reported very weak or no imagery, and eight of them spoke one language. A one-time survey with self-rated fluency cannot show that languages change imagery, and the paper's figure that languages explain 97% of the differences in scores came from five group averages, one of them a single person.
Muraki and Pexman · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia showed typical semantic processing effects for both motor and visual word properties. This indicates that conscious mental imagery is not required for the sensorimotor simulations that support word meaning.
Megla, Prasad and Bainbridge · Cerebral Cortex
Researchers found that an aphantasic twin had surprisingly similar brain activity to their imager twin during memory tasks despite lacking visual imagery. This suggests aphantasia may be a spectrum with more preserved visual information than previously thought.
Abdelrahman, Melcher and Ripollés · Psychophysiology
People with aphantasia felt less emotionally engaged by audio and video stories than typical imagers, though they followed them as well. Only typical imagers had higher heart rates for audiobooks than videos, which suggests imagery takes effort.
Scholz, Monzel and Liu · Current Biology
Neural activity in aphantasia during imagery tasks lacks the perception-like representational overlap found in typical imagers. This suggests that neural activity in aphantasics reflects alternative non-perceptual strategies rather than unconscious mental imagery.
Rebecchi · Journal of Psychedelic Studies
One autistic woman aged 34, who said she had never had images in her mind, reported that they first appeared after she took psilocybin truffles and stayed after the drug wore off. Her imagery questionnaire scores, the first two recalled about a year later, went from no imagery to the most vivid possible, then settled just above average at 12 and 33 months, though by a year her images had turned gray and she struggled to imagine movement. She kept taking psilocybin during follow-up, and the author says a single self-reported case should be read with caution.
Speed, Geraerds and McRae · Memory & Cognition
Thirty people with aphantasia and 29 typical imagers decided whether one word named a physical part of another (is a mane part of a lion?). Both groups were equally fast and accurate, and both were slower, by a similar amount, when the wrong answers were related words, which forces a closer check. In that version, ratings of each part's perceptual features predicted response times in both groups, which the authors read as automatic, unconscious simulation that does not need conscious imagery, though an abstract, non-visual strategy is also possible. People with aphantasia may also lean more on word associations.
Liu and Bartolomeo · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
In this Letter, the authors propose that aphantasia involves weaker functional links between high-level visual areas and the left prefrontal cortex. They argue this may explain how visual knowledge survives without imagery, pending confirmation.
Scholz · Mind & Language
This commentary on a recent book about mental imagery argues that people with aphantasia do not have hidden, unconscious imagery, contrary to the book's proposal. Two recent brain scan studies it reviews found that their visual areas carry information when they try to imagine, but not in the same form as when seeing, which points to other strategies. Because those studies tested deliberate imagery, the commentary leaves open whether automatic imagery, for example set off by sounds, occurs without awareness; it notes evidence on both sides.
Monzel and colleagues · Cognition
Aphantasics showed a reduced Stroop effect for accuracy compared to controls, though response times remained similar. This suggests that mental imagery contributes to the interference between words and colors by competing with actual perception.
Li and colleagues · Memory
In an online study, 65 people with weak or no imagery and 72 typical imagers described a walking route they took at least weekly and one taken only once or twice in three years. For the familiar route, both groups gave similar numbers of spatial, object and sensory details. For the rarely traveled route, the group with weak or no imagery gave a smaller share of sensory details, nearly all about how things looked. The authors suggest repeated exposure lets people without imagery recall as much detail by other means, such as words and meaning.