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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Wright and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia rated feeling a movement in the mind as hard but easier than seeing it, especially right after doing the movement. This suggests kinesthetic imagery may exist without visual imagery, though weakly.
Wright and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
Researchers found that 0.9% of people have aphantasia and 3.3% have hypophantasia in a large global sample. This highlights the need to account for imagery differences in research and clinical settings.
Esselaar and colleagues · Brain Communications
Individuals with aphantasia do not show increased corticospinal excitability during motor imagery or action observation. This suggests that aphantasia may involve a neurophysiological inability to simulate actions rather than a metacognitive deficit.
Renner and colleagues · Behaviour Research and Therapy
Mental imagery of future activities increases motivation and anticipated reward for those tasks. This suggests that simulating positive future events can act as a motivational amplifier to help people overcome procrastination.
Slofstra and colleagues · Cognition and Emotion
Higher levels of visual mental imagery in daily life were associated with better mood and more positive affect, regardless of the imagery's valence. This suggests that spontaneous imagery-based processing may play a protective role in emotional well-being.
Pearson and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
This review argues that visual imagery works like a weak form of seeing, with brain activity resembling perception's as early as the primary visual cortex. It also covers intrusive imagery in disorders such as PTSD and imagery-based therapy.
Nelis and colleagues · Psychologica Belgica
The authors translated a 12-item questionnaire about how often people use mental pictures in daily life, the Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale, into Dutch and tested it with 1,297 people, most of them psychology students in Leuven, Belgium. It measured one general tendency with acceptable reliability, and scores were only moderately related to how vivid people said their imagery was, so frequency and vividness are linked but not the same. Three items worked poorly, and about 2% of people said they never had images in more than half of the situations described.
Holmes and colleagues · Behaviour Research and Therapy
Researchers propose that mental imagery acts as an emotional amplifier in bipolar disorder, fueling mood volatility and anxiety. This suggests targeting imagery could improve cognitive behavioral treatments for the disorder.