Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
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.
Pounder and colleagues · Cortex
Twenty people with aphantasia were as accurate as 20 typical imagers on tests of memory, spatial span, planning and mental rotation. Differences appeared only in speed: they slowed more than controls as a planning puzzle got harder.
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Bainbridge and colleagues · Cortex
People with aphantasia drew fewer objects and less color from memory than typical imagers, but placed objects just as accurately and added fewer false ones. This suggests memory for objects and memory for locations rely on separate systems.