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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Lambert and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that anauralia and aphantasia share a 0.8% prevalence but have distinct psychological profiles. This suggests that the absence of sensory imagery is modality-specific rather than a single, unified condition.
New and colleagues · Cortex
Aphantasia is linked to higher rates of neurodevelopmental, neurological, and psychiatric disorders compared to typical imagery. This highlights the need for multisensory evaluations and tailored interventions for neurodiverse profiles.
Hangai · Rhizomata
The paper studies how the ancient Aristotelian philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias treated phantasia, the power behind remembering, dreaming and imagining, as separate from perception. On this reading, a perception leaves a bodily residue that keeps its content after the object is gone, and that residue later triggers the experience. Errors, dreams and images of things that never existed, such as a winged horse, arise when a residue loses detail and phantasia fills the gap from other stored residues. The paper concerns ancient philosophy and does not discuss aphantasia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Palermo and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In an online survey of 490 Italian adults, about 3% scored very low on a questionnaire's object imagery scale (pictures of things) and 3.5% on its spatial scale (layouts and rotation), with smaller groups at the high end. The low object group reported weak or missing images of faces, objects and events, yet still reported dream images; the low spatial group reported trouble mainly with mental rotation. Both low groups reported a poorer sense of direction, but neither differed reliably from controls on everyday memory or face recognition. Nearly all measures were self-report.
Takahashi and colleagues
Researchers found that aphantasia often involves a lack of imagery across multiple senses, not just vision. This highlights the importance of using multi-sensory assessments to fully capture the diverse experiences of those with aphantasia.
Gabriele and colleagues · Biological Psychology
Researchers developed the Interoceptive Accuracy Scale (IAS) to distinguish between beliefs about interoceptive attention and actual perceived accuracy. This tool allows for more precise measurement of how internal bodily awareness relates to mental health.
Dance, Ipser and Simner · Consciousness and Cognition
Screening 1,004 people who did not know the study was about imagery, researchers found that 3.9% had aphantasia and 0.8% had no imagery at all. This suggests a useful benchmark for how common aphantasia is.
Zabelina and Condon · Psychological Research
The Four-Factor Imagination Scale (FFIS) identifies frequency, complexity, emotional valence, and directedness as distinct dimensions of imagination. This suggests imagination is a multi-faceted construct rather than just a measure of mental imagery.
Preece and colleagues · Personality and Individual Differences
Researchers built a 24-item questionnaire for alexithymia, difficulty attending to, recognizing and putting words to one's own feelings, with separate scores for bad and good feelings. In two online surveys of Australian adults (231 and 748 people), its scores held together well and rose with depression, anxiety and stress, and people reported more trouble with bad feelings than good ones. The paper did not test it in clinical groups or check whether scores stay stable over time.