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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McCormick · International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring
In a composite case of a senior lawyer with aphantasia, a coach kept mainly to non-visual methods, such as career stories, four values words, goals and daily habits, and she said she had made some useful progress. The author suggests other coaches do the same, though the case never tried a visualization exercise.
Hing and Sibley-White · Educating Young People for a Sustainable Future
Four university students with aphantasia said open creative tasks, holding several ideas in mind and putting things in order made school harder, and described strikingly similar strategies: talking things through, ready-made examples, ideally ones they could hold, and step-by-step plans. The authors argue for treating aphantasia as neurodiversity.
Pounder and colleagues · Cogent Psychology
Six women living in the UK who could not form images at will were interviewed about life with aphantasia. Difficulties with recalling faces, reliving personal memories and finding their way came up most, though each woman described a different mix. All six reported images in dreams, some only rarely; several had sudden images at times of intense emotion or deep relaxation, and some felt their images were there but out of reach. All six said they could not imagine smells or tastes.
Gouveia Gaglianone and colleagues · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
In online interviews with 20 adults who were not in treatment for psychological problems, imagined futures centered on goals, family and friends, the outdoors, planning and travel, and some found picturing their goals stressful as well as motivating. After a 10-minute video of calming nature scenes, participants said it was easier to picture a future scene and that the picture felt clearer, though one found the laptop screen not immersive. This small interview study did not measure imagery or compare against a no-video condition, and it excluded people who reported aphantasia.
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.