Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Vetterlein and colleagues · Neurobiology of Pain
In a brain-scanning study of 82 healthy adults, people imagined themselves in everyday painful situations, such as burning a lip on a hot drink, and matched painless ones, shown as pictures or text. Imagining pain raised activity in frontal, motor, body-sensing and parietal areas and the cerebellum, regions earlier studies link to pain, and also in visual areas. Pain sensitivity and sense of control did not predict this activity. With no real-pain comparison, the authors call the evidence for shared brain activity between imagined and felt pain preliminary, and imagery ability was not measured.
Monzel and colleagues · Perception
People with aphantasia performed worse than controls on both face and object recognition tasks. This suggests that a lack of mental imagery may lead to broader visual recognition deficits beyond just faces.
Want to take part? See the studies you can join.
Running a study? We can help you recruit participants.