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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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.
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.
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.
Pearson, Clifford and Tong · Current Biology
Imagining a specific pattern can strongly bias which of two competing stimuli reach awareness during binocular rivalry. This demonstrates that mental imagery creates a short-term sensory trace that directly shapes subsequent conscious perception.