Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Want to take part? See the studies you can join.
Running a study? We can help you recruit participants.
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.
Lorenzatti · Philosophical Psychology
This philosophy paper weighs four explanations for why some people report no visual imagery: they describe the same experience differently, they fail to notice images they have, their brains form image-like representations they cannot consciously reach, or no such representations form and other strategies do the work. Drawing on studies of fear responses, binocular rivalry and pupil size, it rejects the first two and argues that the last fits the evidence best, though the third cannot be ruled out. It proposes eye-tracking, pupil and word-memory studies to tell these two apart.
DeKock · The Confluence
This short literature review, drawing on eight sources, describes visual imagery as a spectrum from aphantasia to hyperphantasia and summarizes research on memory, emotion, brain areas and measurement. It argues that teaching and therapy should allow for differences in imagery, for example by offering non-visual approaches to people with aphantasia. It reports no new data, and some of its claims do not match the studies it cites.
Nanay · Mind & Language
This short reply to three commentaries on a 2023 book about mental imagery restates the book's view that aphantasia is not a single condition: many people with it still dream in images or have flashbacks but cannot call up images at will, which differs from having no conscious imagery at all. Most of the reply concerns other questions, chiefly how the book's idea that imagery forms part of everyday seeing differs from predictive processing theories, and how philosophy can work with the sciences of the mind. It reports no new data.
Silvanto · Frontiers in Psychology
In this short opinion piece, the author proposes that aphantasia arises when the insula, a brain region that tracks signals from inside the body, gives those signals too little weight. On this account, the frontal signals that should build an image are then too weak to activate visual areas, and the sense of control over one's own mental acts is weakened. Because the problem lies in voluntary control, the account fits reports that many people with aphantasia still dream in pictures. The author acknowledges that this is a theoretical model with limited direct evidence so far.
Bilzer and Monzel · Vision
In an online survey, 226 adults rated how vivid their imagery is for sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, body sensation and emotion, when imagining on purpose and in recent dreams; 158 repeated it four weeks later. Ratings for each sense were linked across waking imagery and dreams, but ratings were more closely linked within each state than across them, so the two are related but partly separate. Dreams felt more emotional, while sound, smell, taste and touch were weaker in dreams. The link between waking and dream imagery was stronger in people who often recall dreams or have lucid dreams.
Phillips · Noûs
This philosophy paper argues that many people with aphantasia do well on tasks thought to need imagery because they keep spatial imagery (a sense of layout, shape and movement) while losing object imagery (color, brightness and detail). On this view, vividness questionnaires ask only about picture-like images, so spared spatial imagery goes unreported, and objective signs of missing imagery, such as no pupil response to imagined light, reflect only the lost object imagery. The paper reviews earlier studies rather than testing the idea, and suggests aphantasia is best seen as a family of different imagery losses.
Liu and colleagues · Cortex
In a 7-tesla brain imaging study of 10 people with aphantasia and 10 typical imagers, attempted imagery activated similar visual areas in both groups. In aphantasia, a key imagery region was less connected with frontal and parietal areas.
Silvanto and Nagai · Brain Topography
Researchers propose that mental imagery requires the integration of sensory information with internal physiological signals via the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. This suggests aphantasia may stem from a failure to ground sensory simulations in bodily experience.
Bouyer and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In three student samples, the link between autistic traits and imagery vividness came mostly from autism-questionnaire items about imagination. The authors conclude that any link between imagery vividness and autistic traits is likely weak.
Gouveia Gaglianone and colleagues · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
In online interviews with 20 adults who were not in treatment for psychological problems, imagined futures centered on goals, family and friends, the outdoors, planning and travel, and some found picturing their goals stressful as well as motivating. After a 10-minute video of calming nature scenes, participants said it was easier to picture a future scene and that the picture felt clearer, though one found the laptop screen not immersive. This small interview study did not measure imagery or compare against a no-video condition, and it excluded people who reported aphantasia.
Bouyer and colleagues · Cognition
Researchers found that while mental imagery can bias which image dominates during binocular rivalry, it does not objectively improve the detection of probes within those images. This suggests that imagery priming may reflect a subjective decision bias rather than a true increase in visual sensitivity.
Purkart and colleagues · Cognition
People with aphantasia did not show priming effects in tasks requiring mental imagery, unlike typical imagers. This provides objective behavioral evidence that aphantasia involves a genuine lack of both conscious and unconscious mental imagery.
Hechler and colleagues · Molecular Autism
Working with 22 people from the autism and autistic communities, 13 of them autistic, researchers reworded a 42-item questionnaire on autistic traits to be clearer and less stigmatizing. They then tested the revised version online with 1,439 adults, 331 of whom reported an autism diagnosis. It kept its intended six-part structure, agreed closely with two older questionnaires and measured women and men on the same footing; people identifying as non-binary scored highest. The authors call this initial evidence and say that using it for screening needs checking against confirmed diagnoses.
Chang and colleagues · Current Biology
Researchers found that stimulus-specific information can be decoded from the early visual cortex of people with aphantasia during imagery attempts. This suggests that aphantasia involves a representational break between neural activity and conscious experience.
Arnold and colleagues · Cortex
Among university students, those who rated their imagery as less vivid were less likely to picture something, like a pink elephant, when told not to. This suggests weaker imagery may bring more resistance to unwanted images.
Krempel · Erkenntnis
A philosophy paper argues that wordless, imageless "unsymbolized" thoughts and total aphantasia challenge the view that conscious thought needs mental images. It concludes they are evidence that conscious thoughts can occur without imagery.
Husain and colleagues · BMC Psychology
Pooling 57 samples (43,715 people in 22 languages, none of them clinical), the authors estimate the internal consistency of both versions of the Big Five Inventory, a personality questionnaire: 0.73 to 0.80 across traits for the 44-item original and 0.80 to 0.89 for the 60-item revision, which was higher on every trait. Reliability varied a lot between samples and showed signs of publication bias. Some figures in the report do not agree with each other, so exact values should be used with care.
Monzel and colleagues · Psychophysiology
People with aphantasia achieved successful fear extinction through propositional thought despite lacking mental imagery. This suggests that imaginal exposure therapy may be effective for aphantasic individuals by relying on non-visual cognitive processes.