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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Gao and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In typical imagers, a bigger shift of judged action time toward a tone tended to mean a smaller shift in judged urge time, a link not clearly seen in core aphantasia. Imagery may relate to how these shifts are coordinated, not how big each one is.
Kvamme, Nagai and Silvanto · Trends Open
In this opinion article, the authors propose that the brain's processing of body signals, centered on the anterior insula, is a shared source of both mental imagery and emotion. On this view, conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, autism and ADHD change imagery because they disturb this same system, and body-focused treatments might help restore imagery. The authors say the causal direction has not yet been shown and call for long-term and treatment studies to test it.
Scholz and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that aphantasics activate sensory precursors that lack the perceptual geometry of true imagery. This suggests aphantasia is a failure of multi-stage integration rather than just a lack of neural reactivation.
Kvamme and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Among people with aphantasia, those with more (though still weak) imagery reported more alexithymia and anxiety, the reverse of typical imagers. The authors suggest faint imagery may prompt emotional processing that fails.
Kvamme and colleagues · Heliyon
In 591 young adults, more vivid imagery went with an inward-focused style: attention to body signals, mindfulness, and openness. In statistical models, imagery related to mental health only through this style, partly through lower alexithymia.
Kvamme and colleagues · NeuroImage
In about 550 adults scanned in Poland and Denmark, researchers compared brain wiring and resting brain activity with how vividly people rated their imagery. More vivid imagery went with tighter local connections around the left fusiform gyrus, a high-level visual area, in resting activity; with more tightly clustered wiring in visual cortex; and with better-connected wiring of the right insula. Each link was small: together they accounted for about 3% of the differences between people.
Kvamme, Sandberg and Silvanto · Neuropsychologia
In this short opinion piece, with no new data, the authors propose that vivid imagery belongs to a wider habit of paying attention to one's own inner life: body signals, emotions and thoughts. They link this habit to openness, conscientiousness and extraversion, and expect it to run opposite to difficulty recognizing and describing feelings. They leave open whether turning attention inward builds imagery or vivid imagery draws attention inward, and warn that vividness ratings may partly reflect personality and habits of description.