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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Hashim and colleagues · Music & Science
People with aphantasia felt slightly less intense emotion to film music and reported fewer music-evoked memories, yet enjoyed music as much as others. The authors suggest imagery may deepen musical emotion but is not needed to enjoy music.
Dupont and colleagues · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Aphantasics showed no increase in motor cortex excitability while reading action sentences, unlike those with typical imagery. This suggests that mental imagery is a necessary component for the motor simulation of language.
Pace, Koenig-Robert and Pearson · Psychological Science
Mental imagery reversed the suppressive effects of visual adaptation, unlike weak perception which increased them. This suggests that imagery and perception rely on different neural mechanisms, with imagery likely acting through inhibitory modulation.
Dance, Hole and Simner · Cortex
Aphantasics performed worse on face recognition tasks but were just as accurate as controls at constructing face composites from memory. This suggests that while visual imagery facilitates face recognition, it is not required for accurate face recall.
Dando and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Eyewitnesses with aphantasia recalled fewer correct details of a filmed crime than typical imagers but made no more errors. They recalled least when asked to picture the scene, which suggests imagery-based interviews may not suit them.
Monzel and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia performed no differently from others on a memory task but felt less confident, and imagery was not linked to school grades. The authors argue aphantasia is neutral neurodivergence and a disorder label may do harm.
Liu and Bartolomeo · Cortex
People with aphantasia were as accurate as typical and vivid imagers on imagery and perception tasks, but slower. The authors suggest visual knowledge is still reached without a conscious image, or through other strategies.
Bergmann and Ortiz-Tudela · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Researchers propose that aphantasia stems from specific deficits in high-level feedback signals along the visual "what" stream during memory retrieval. This suggests that memory impairments in aphantasia are tied to the inability to reinstate precise object features rather than a general episodic memory failure.
Monzel and colleagues · Perception
People with aphantasia performed worse than controls on both face and object recognition tasks. This suggests that a lack of mental imagery may lead to broader visual recognition deficits beyond just faces.
Monzel and colleagues · Psychophysiology
This is the published plan for a study, accepted before data collection, so it reports no results. It set out to test whether people need to picture a feared object for their fear to fade while they imagine it, comparing 30 people with aphantasia, 30 typical imagers with eyes closed and 30 typical imagers staring at a bright screen to dampen their imagery. Fear was to be measured through skin responses after people learned to link one of two pictures with an electric shock. A separate 2025 paper reported the results: the fear faded in all three groups.
Wagner and Monzel · Brain and Behavior
Sixteen people with schizophrenia and 44 people without it rated their visual imagery and did a binocular rivalry test, in which a pattern someone has just imagined is more likely to dominate what they then see. The groups did not differ on either measure, although the people with schizophrenia reported far more hallucination-like experiences. Among the people with schizophrenia, more vivid self-rated imagery went with more religious-themed hallucinations. The sample was small, all patients were on medication, and the rivalry test was not very reliable.
Muraki, Speed and Pexman · Nature Reviews Psychology
A review of whether understanding words relies on quietly replaying sights, sounds and movements in the brain, often called simulation, and what aphantasia could reveal about it. The authors suggest such simulation may be a kind of imagery that is involuntary and unconscious, and set out studies to test whether people without voluntary imagery still show its effects. They also summarize what was known in 2023 about aphantasia, including its estimated prevalence, the value of objective tests alongside questionnaires, and dream imagery in about 60% of people with it.
Prasad, Megla and Bainbridge · Journal of Vision
Aphantasics show significant neural overlap with typical imagers during memory recall despite reporting no visual imagery. This suggests that aphantasia may involve a disruption in conscious access to visual information rather than a total absence of it.
Beran and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Of 5,010 U.S. adults, 8.9% said they had no mental imagery, but only 1.5% scored in the aphantasia range on a standard questionnaire. This suggests estimates of how common aphantasia is depend on how it is measured.
Takahashi and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
In an online survey of 2,871 Japanese adults, 3.7% had low scores on a standard imagery questionnaire, but 12.1% said they could not, or could barely, picture things such as furniture or a friend's face, and the two groups overlapped poorly. A second survey of 774 adults suggested part of the gap comes from people with poor face recognition answering the face part of the question. Among those with low questionnaire scores, some reported weak imagery in every sense and others mainly in vision, so the authors recommend using several measures, including other senses.
Monzel, Vetterlein and Reuter · Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
Aphantasia met only the rarity criterion for a mental disorder: memory differences and distress were too mild on average. But about a third reported clinically relevant distress, so the authors advise assessing individual cases.
Blomkvist · Mind & Language
This philosophy paper reviews early studies of aphantasia and picks out six recurring findings: weak or absent voluntary visual imagery, uneven loss in the other senses, involuntary imagery such as dreams often less affected, fewer details in memories, fewer details when imagining general or future events, and intact spatial abilities. It argues that two earlier accounts cannot explain all six and proposes that aphantasia is a fault in how the memory system retrieves sensory details on demand, rather than a problem of vision alone. The theory makes predictions that have not yet been tested.
Keogh, Wicken and Pearson
People with aphantasia reported fewer intrusive memories after a distressing film, and theirs were mostly verbal rather than visual. The authors suggest visual imagery is tied to how often trauma memories intrude, which may matter for PTSD.
Wittmann and Şatırer · Learning & Memory
People with aphantasia remembered which items went together as accurately as others but were less often highly confident. This suggests imagery contributes to memory confidence rather than accuracy.
Cavedon-Taylor · Frontiers in Psychology
Aphantasia may primarily involve a lack of voluntary imagery while leaving involuntary imagery intact. This distinction suggests that aphantasics might still be susceptible to psychological disorders driven by intrusive, non-voluntary mental images.