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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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Michel and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Aphantasia may involve nonconscious imagistic representations that lack phenomenal awareness, similar to blindsight. This suggests the condition is primarily a deficit of conscious access rather than a total absence of mental imagery.
Argueta and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
A review of 52 aphantasia studies concludes it is a visual deficit, not a mental disorder. Memory was the most studied topic, but most memory evidence was self-reported and some objective tests found no difference.
Bruder and Zehra
Researchers found significant cultural differences in mental imagery vividness, with WEIRD and South-East Asian groups reporting higher levels than those from the Middle East and North Africa. This highlights the need to consider cultural factors when studying imagery across all senses.
Mawtus and colleagues · Collabra: Psychology
Among people reporting a mental health condition, fewer with aphantasia than imagers reported intrusive sensory symptoms (31% vs 74%), and they found visual imagery in therapy less helpful. The authors urge adapting techniques to the person.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
This short definition, published in a special issue of the journal Cortex, describes aphantasia as the absence or near-absence of imagery, most often the inability to picture things while fully awake, as opposed to simply thinking about them. Aphantasia affects deliberate imagery, may affect spontaneous imagery, and often leaves imagery in dreams intact. It can be lifelong or acquired, and the note proposes labels such as visual, auditory, multisensory and global aphantasia, while recording that some researchers keep the word for vision alone.
Williams and Suggate · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
People with low imagery reported being less absorbed in stories, especially in seeing scenes and feeling transported, yet still enjoyed reading. This suggests imagery shapes how reading feels more than whether people like it.
Monzel, Karneboge and Reuter · Biomarkers in Neuropsychiatry
Aphantasia is linked to reduced physiological and self-reported sympathy for verbal scenarios and slower emotion recognition in others. This suggests mental imagery is a key mechanism for amplifying emotional and empathic responses.
Baade and colleagues · Chemistry Education Research and Practice
In a small study at an Australian university, 18 first-year chemistry students did timed tasks with chemistry pictures and 3D rotation puzzles and rated how vivid their imagery was in several senses; seven were interviewed a year later. How vividly students could picture things did not predict how well they solved the spatial tasks. The only interviewee with weak visual imagery described "impressions" and a running description in words instead of pictures, and solved the rotation puzzles with a verbal method. The authors call the results preliminary because so few students took part.
Eker, Ozer and Gencel · International Journal on Studies in Education
Students and graduates with aphantasia reported slightly higher undergraduate grades than others and differed only in learning orientation. This suggests lacking visual imagery did not hold back academic achievement in this group.
Gregory · Philosophical Studies
The paper argues that two features of dreams are better explained if dreaming is a kind of imagining than if it is hallucination plus belief. Things can be true in a dream without being shown, as when a dreamer on a beach simply is an accountant, and dreams can skip across long stretches of time the way films do. Both match how people settle what their waking imaginings stand for. The paper calls its arguments supportive but not conclusive and does not claim that dreams never involve hallucinations or beliefs.
Montabes de la Cruz and colleagues · Current Biology
Twenty-three people with aphantasia listened to recorded sound scenes of a forest, a crowd and traffic while blindfolded in a brain scanner. The type of sound could mostly not be read from their early visual areas, except in two small regions, although it could be in earlier studies of sighted and blind people. The drop was clear against a small blind group but not statistically reliable against 10 sighted people scanned years before. The authors suggest that signals from hearing areas into the visual cortex may be weaker in aphantasia, not only those used for imagery.
Goldwasser · Philosophical Studies
Episodic remembering and active imagining are the same kind of agent-involving process of constructing and using imagery. This suggests that memory is a mental action subject to the same agential constraints and intentions as imagination.
Kvamme, Sandberg and Silvanto · Neuropsychologia
In this short opinion piece, with no new data, the authors propose that vivid imagery belongs to a wider habit of paying attention to one's own inner life: body signals, emotions and thoughts. They link this habit to openness, conscientiousness and extraversion, and expect it to run opposite to difficulty recognizing and describing feelings. They leave open whether turning attention inward builds imagery or vivid imagery draws attention inward, and warn that vividness ratings may partly reflect personality and habits of description.
Cabbai and colleagues · Current Biology
In an fMRI study, the type of sound people with aphantasia heard could be decoded from their primary visual cortex, though they reported no imagery. A higher region, the precuneus, tracked whether imagery was experienced.
Best and colleagues · Cognitive and Behavioral Practice
This case report describes one man with PTSD after an assault who had 10 sessions of trauma-focused cognitive therapy, with the imagined revisiting of the trauma done inside a low-cost virtual copy of the real site, built from phone photos in two days. His PTSD symptom score fell from 64 to 19 and he no longer met criteria for PTSD; he found the virtual scene realistic and said it prepared him to visit the real place. The authors note that a single case cannot show what virtual reality added. The paper did not measure his imagery or mention aphantasia.
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.
Wright and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
Researchers found that 0.9% of people have aphantasia and 3.3% have hypophantasia in a large global sample. This highlights the need to account for imagery differences in research and clinical settings.
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.
Reeder and colleagues · Cognition
Aphantasics performed as well as typical imagers on a precise visual working memory task by using non-visual spatial and sensorimotor strategies. This demonstrates that mental imagery is not required for maintaining high-fidelity visual information.
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.