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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Arnold and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Researchers propose an Emergent Property Framework where imagery arises from coordinated activity across a network of brain regions. This explains why aphantasia presents with diverse multisensory profiles and varying cognitive impacts.
Gao and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In typical imagers, a bigger shift of judged action time toward a tone tended to mean a smaller shift in judged urge time, a link not clearly seen in core aphantasia. Imagery may relate to how these shifts are coordinated, not how big each one is.
Loo and Buchsbaum · Consciousness and Cognition
Aphantasic individuals showed a greater accuracy drop than controls when backward masking disrupted visual pattern completion. This suggests that aphantasia involves weakened recurrent neural processing that affects both imagery and perception.
Monzel and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
VVIQ items showed high redundancy for identifying aphantasia, with inter-item correlations ranging from .79 to .90. A single screening question about visualizing a familiar place achieved high specificity (98.8%) and sensitivity (97.5%) against the strictest definition of core aphantasia (VVIQ = 16), suggesting the full 16-item questionnaire is unnecessary for screening purposes.
Delhaye and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia remembered which color went with which shape as well as typical imagers, even for hard-to-name shapes. The authors conclude that neither imagery nor verbal labels is necessary for this kind of memory.
Pepin and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Involuntary mental imagery is more frequent and vivid than hallucinations, though both share similar phenomenological traits. This suggests these inner experiences exist on a continuum rather than being entirely distinct phenomena.
Mckilliam and Kirberg · Consciousness and Cognition
Researchers found that current evidence for unconscious mental imagery in aphantasia is inconclusive due to potential response biases and non-imagistic strategies. This highlights the need for objective physiological markers to distinguish between truly unconscious imagery and unreported conscious experiences.
Pauly-Takacs and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia recalled and recognized word lists as well as others and were just as prone to false memories. This suggests aphantasia neither weakens verbal memory nor protects against verbal false memories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speed, Eekhof and Mak · Consciousness and Cognition
Readers with aphantasia felt less absorbed in a short story and less sympathy for its characters, yet liked it as much as other readers. This suggests mental imagery shapes how a story is experienced but is not the only route to enjoying one.
Sulfaro, Robinson and Carlson · Consciousness and Cognition
In an online survey of 242 Sydney psychology students, people described how they see and hear the letter O in their mind. Imagined sounds started sooner, lasted longer, held steadier and came more automatically than imagined images, while images were easier to place in space and were reported more often with the eyes closed. More than half the students reported no visual image at least once during the survey, and the authors argue that imagery is unstable for many people and hard to measure by self-report.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dance and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Across two large samples, grapheme-color synesthesia was as common in people with aphantasia as in others. In a separate study, 118 people with aphantasia reported more autistic traits than controls, mainly in imagination and social skills.