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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Milton · Current Biology
This short commentary discusses two brain-imaging studies, published together in 2024, in which people listened to everyday sounds. In one, the kind of sound could be read from typical imagers' primary visual cortex but not from aphantasic people's when they tried to imagine it, yet it could be read when they simply listened, though they reported no imagery. In the other, it could mostly not be read from aphantasic people's early visual areas. Both studies propose that weaker feedback from higher brain areas to the visual cortex may explain this.
King, Buxton and Tyndall · Consciousness and Cognition
Autistic adults in an online survey reported less vivid visual and emotional imagery than non-autistic adults, and more of them scored in the aphantasia range (20% versus 6%). Imagery in other senses did not differ.
Monzel and colleagues · eLife
People with aphantasia recalled fewer event, emotion and sensory details from their own lives than controls. During recall their hippocampus was less active, their visual cortex more active, and the two lacked the coupling seen in controls.
Larner, Leff and Nachev · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
This review and conceptual analysis argues that mental images are not seen, so rating them from faint to vivid, as imagery questionnaires do, cannot be checked against anything. The authors propose defining aphantasia by a person's sincere statement that they have no visual imagery, and studying it with behavioral tests and physical measures, such as pupil responses, rather than graded questionnaires or brain scans alone. They suggest new tasks, for example with ambiguous figures, to separate imagery from how people report it.
Westby · Word of Mouth
This short overview, written for speech-language pathologists in a practitioner newsletter, describes aphantasia as a difference rather than a disorder, often affecting other senses and memory. It suggests how aphantasia might affect children's pretend play, reading, spelling and planning, and notes there is no research showing that people with aphantasia can be trained to visualize. Most of its list of possible benefits, such as protection from trauma, grief and depression, comes without supporting studies.
Kronemer and colleagues · Neuroscience of Consciousness
Researchers found that visual imagery vividness positively correlates with the contrast and sharpness of negative afterimages. This suggests that afterimages and mental imagery may share top-down neural mechanisms in the brain.
Blazhenkova, Kotov and Kotova
This preprint, not yet peer reviewed, asked two groups of university students (185 and 181) what share of people have no visual imagery and what share have imagery as vivid as seeing. Average guesses were 27 to 32% and 37 to 53%, far above survey estimates of about 1% and 3%, and they overestimated how common high and low sensory sensitivity are. High guesses for one extreme went with high guesses for the other. The authors point to general biases in judging rare traits, with people's own imagery playing a limited part, and call for objective tests of imagery.
Siena and Simons · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
People with aphantasia rated their memories as less vivid but recalled object colors and locations as accurately as others. The authors suggest some may lack awareness of their imagery rather than the imagery itself.
Ale and Burns
People with aphantasia had overall PTSD scores similar to others but reported more complex PTSD symptoms, such as a negative self-view and relationship problems. This suggests they may need more support after trauma than is currently considered.
Kay, Keogh and Pearson · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia were slower but more accurate than controls on mental rotation tasks, favoring analytic strategies over visual ones. This suggests that aphantasics use non-visual cognitive methods to solve complex spatial problems.
Zeman · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
About 1% of people report no visual imagery and about 3% report imagery as vivid as seeing, and objective tests are starting to back these reports up. The review suggests conscious imagery is not needed for thinking or creativity.
Bouyer and Arnold · Frontiers in Psychology
Deep aphantasia may involve atypical sensory experiences where perception is minimally shaped by prior expectations or feedback. This suggests some forms of aphantasia impact both voluntary imagery and the processing of actual visual inputs.
Krempel and Monzel · Consciousness and Cognition
In a new experiment, people with aphantasia rated afterimages as fainter than typical imagers did. Together with a review of other studies, this suggests aphantasia affects images that arise on their own, not only ones made on purpose.
Keogh and Pearson · Neuroscience Research
Individuals with aphantasia showed no evidence of sensory visual imagery when tested with an objective binocular rivalry paradigm. This confirms that aphantasia is a genuine lack of sensory imagery rather than just a difference in metacognitive reporting.
Dawes, Keogh and Pearson · Neuroscience Research
Aphantasia is not a uniform condition but consists of distinct sub-groups, including those with purely visual deficits and others with multi-sensory impairments. This highlights the need for multi-sensory screening to better understand individual cognitive profiles.
Monzel, Handlogten and Reuter · Cognition
People with aphantasia do not experience the verbal overshadowing effect, which typically impairs face recognition after verbal description. This suggests that visual mental imagery is a necessary component for this memory interference to occur.
Incekara and Blom · Frontiers in Psychology
Reading Carl Jung's journals and other self-reports, the authors argue that many of his unusual experiences, such as a mental image of a dead friend so vivid that he considered getting up to follow it, reflected extremely vivid imagery (hyperphantasia) rather than a psychotic illness. They suggest he was probably born with this vividness and developed it through a practice he called active imagination. They accept that some daytime hallucinations were psychotic symptoms, which are fairly common in people without a disorder, and call for research on hyperphantasia in psychotic experiences.
Esselaar and colleagues · Brain Communications
Individuals with aphantasia do not show increased corticospinal excitability during motor imagery or action observation. This suggests that aphantasia may involve a neurophysiological inability to simulate actions rather than a metacognitive deficit.
Dupont and colleagues · Brain Communications
Aphantasics showed no increase in motor system excitability during motor imagery or action observation tasks. This suggests aphantasia involves a physiological impairment in motor simulation rather than just a deficit in metacognition.
Speed, Eekhof and Mak · Consciousness and Cognition
Readers with aphantasia felt less absorbed in a short story and less sympathy for its characters, yet liked it as much as other readers. This suggests mental imagery shapes how a story is experienced but is not the only route to enjoying one.