Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Larner, Leff and Nachev · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
This review and conceptual analysis argues that mental images are not seen, so rating them from faint to vivid, as imagery questionnaires do, cannot be checked against anything. The authors propose defining aphantasia by a person's sincere statement that they have no visual imagery, and studying it with behavioral tests and physical measures, such as pupil responses, rather than graded questionnaires or brain scans alone. They suggest new tasks, for example with ambiguous figures, to separate imagery from how people report it.
Thorudottir and colleagues · Brain Sciences
An architect who said his imagery had been vivid lost almost all of it after a stroke on both sides of the back of the brain, scoring close to the lowest possible score on an imagery questionnaire. He also had trouble recognizing faces and seeing colors, yet four other stroke patients, including another architect, kept their imagery although their test results largely overlapped with his. Brain scans showed only small areas in the right lingual gyrus and left fusiform gyrus damaged in him alone, so the authors propose these, especially the left fusiform area, as candidate regions for visual imagery.
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