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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Sabel and colleagues · Psychological Reports
Researchers compared hoarding symptoms in 58 people with aphantasia and 23 with unusually vivid imagery against matched typical imagers, allowing for age and depression. People with aphantasia reported no more hoarding symptoms than their matches, though they leaned more on objects as memory aids. People with very vivid imagery reported fewer hoarding symptoms and were less likely to live in cluttered homes. From this comparison of existing groups, the authors suggest that vivid imagery may protect against hoarding.
Keogh and colleagues · Journal of Vision
Individuals with aphantasia reported experiencing the neon color spreading illusion less intensely than those with visual imagery. This suggests that visual imagery and the neon color illusion may share overlapping neural feedback mechanisms.
Kay, Keogh and Pearson · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia were slower but more accurate than controls on mental rotation tasks, favoring analytic strategies over visual ones. This suggests that aphantasics use non-visual cognitive methods to solve complex spatial problems.
Kay and colleagues · eLife
Individuals with aphantasia do not show the pupillary light response when attempting to imagine bright or dark objects. This provides an objective physiological marker confirming that aphantasia involves a genuine lack of visual sensory imagery.