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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Takamura and colleagues · Cortex
Aphantasic individuals showed eye movement patterns similar to visualizers when exploring mental maps despite reporting no subjective imagery. This suggests aphantasia may reflect reduced metacognitive access to imagery rather than a total absence of representational content.
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.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
People with aphantasia recalled fewer letters than others from a grid flashed for 50 milliseconds, but not from one shown for 5 seconds. This suggests imagery helps hold a split-second visual trace, while other strategies work given more time.
Bartolomeo and Arcangeli · Cortex
Researchers argue that congenital aphantasia is not "imagery blindsight" because individuals retain high-level accuracy and conscious access to information via non-visual routes. This suggests aphantasia involves a selective inability to format information into a quasi-visual experience.
Silvanto · Cortex
A commentary argues that whether to treat aphantasia depends on subtype. Imagery lost after trauma or stress is the clearest candidate, with care aimed at underlying problems; lifelong absent imagery without impairment is variation, not pathology.
Tomastikova and Silson · Cortex
Researchers found that mental imagery of people, but not buildings, significantly primed subsequent perception in a binocular rivalry task. This suggests that the functional impact of imagery on perception is category-specific rather than a universal effect.
Rollo and colleagues · Brain and Cognition
In 49 healthy young adults, 20 minutes of weak, randomly fluctuating electrical current over both temples lowered ratings of how easily they could change one imagined sound into another, compared with a sham session on another day. Ratings of how vivid the imagined sounds were fell by a slightly smaller amount, a trend that did not reach significance. The ratings were self-reported during stimulation, and because no other brain area was stimulated for comparison, the authors cannot rule out a general effect, for example on attention.
Kutsche and colleagues · Cortex
Lesions causing aphantasia are all functionally connected to a specific region in the left ventral visual pathway called the fusiform imagery node. This provides causal evidence that this node's connections are key for voluntary visual imagery.
Gardner, Saurels and Arnold · Cortex
Researchers found that while imagining dark versus bright scenes modulates the pupillary response, this physiological change does not correlate with subjective imagery vividness ratings. This suggests pupillometry is not a reliable objective index for individual differences in imagery strength.
Lebon · Cortex
Individuals with aphantasia show decodable activity in early visual cortices during imagery tasks despite lacking conscious visual experience. This suggests that neural activation in V1 does not necessarily equate to subjective mental imagery.
Koenig-Robert, Keogh and Pearson · Cortex
Some people with aphantasia report gaining visual imagery after using psychedelics, possibly due to increased neural plasticity and connectivity. This sudden onset of imagery could increase the risk of intrusive thoughts and other mental health challenges.
Megla, Prasad and Bainbridge · Cerebral Cortex
Researchers found that an aphantasic twin had surprisingly similar brain activity to their imager twin during memory tasks despite lacking visual imagery. This suggests aphantasia may be a spectrum with more preserved visual information than previously thought.
Scholz, Monzel and Liu · Current Biology
Neural activity in aphantasia during imagery tasks lacks the perception-like representational overlap found in typical imagers. This suggests that neural activity in aphantasics reflects alternative non-perceptual strategies rather than unconscious mental imagery.
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.
Arnold and colleagues · Cortex
Among university students, those who rated their imagery as less vivid were less likely to picture something, like a pink elephant, when told not to. This suggests weaker imagery may bring more resistance to unwanted images.
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.
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.
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.
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.