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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Suggate · Behavior Research Methods
Across three online studies with German university students (96, 345 and 448 people), the author tested a quick task in which people hear questions such as which is softer, a pine needle or a blade of grass, and answer as fast as they can. The task gave consistent results, answers about sight came fastest and about touch slowest, and it measured more than general speed. But scores barely related to people's own ratings of their imagery, which the author reads as the two capturing different things. No group of people with aphantasia was tested.
Rhodes and colleagues · Journal of Applied Sport Psychology
Athletes with low imagery ability significantly improved their multisensory vividness following a functional imagery training intervention. This demonstrates that imagery skills are malleable and can be enhanced through targeted practice.
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.
Vetterlein and colleagues · Neurobiology of Pain
In a brain-scanning study of 82 healthy adults, people imagined themselves in everyday painful situations, such as burning a lip on a hot drink, and matched painless ones, shown as pictures or text. Imagining pain raised activity in frontal, motor, body-sensing and parietal areas and the cerebellum, regions earlier studies link to pain, and also in visual areas. Pain sensitivity and sense of control did not predict this activity. With no real-pain comparison, the authors call the evidence for shared brain activity between imagined and felt pain preliminary, and imagery ability was not measured.
Nedergaard and Lupyan · Psychological Science
People reporting little inner speech (anendophasia) recalled fewer words and judged picture rhymes less accurately, with no difference in task switching. The gaps vanished among those who said they talked out loud.
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.
Dijkstra · Vision
The early visual cortex represents fine-grained visual details during mental imagery in a similar way to perception. This suggests that the recruitment of these areas depends on the level of visual detail required by the mental image.
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.
Pounder and colleagues · PLOS ONE
Twenty-nine people with aphantasia and 30 typical imagers did two tasks thought to need sound imagery: judging, from imagination alone, whether one syllable of a familiar song is sung higher than another, and sorting blended voices between two speakers. Most of the aphantasia group also reported little or no ability to imagine sounds, yet the groups did not clearly differ on either task, even among those reporting the weakest sound imagery. The authors suggest people may solve such tasks another way, for example by treating pitch as height, or that the tasks were not sensitive enough.
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.