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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Zeman and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Replying to a proposal that aphantasia reflects broken mental "rendering," this letter argues that conscious object imagery is unlikely to be a useless by-product. Links with memory, empathy and emotion suggest it may support social life.
Li and colleagues · Memory
In an online study, 65 people with weak or no imagery and 72 typical imagers described a walking route they took at least weekly and one taken only once or twice in three years. For the familiar route, both groups gave similar numbers of spatial, object and sensory details. For the rarely traveled route, the group with weak or no imagery gave a smaller share of sensory details, nearly all about how things looked. The authors suggest repeated exposure lets people without imagery recall as much detail by other means, such as words and meaning.
Palombo, Sheldon and Levine · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Autobiographical memory varies significantly across individuals, ranging from highly superior to severely deficient capacities. This suggests that memory is a trait-like profile driven by distinct neural connectivity and cognitive strategies.
Sheldon, Amaral and Levine · Memory
Thirty-five young adults watched short everyday video clips and then answered true or false questions while looking either at flickering visual noise, which disrupts imagery, or at a plain gray screen. The noise made no difference overall, but the higher people rated their spatial imagery, the more accuracy they lost under noise on questions about what happened and where, though not about object details; object imagery ratings did not predict this loss. The authors suggest strong spatial imagers lean on imagery to rebuild events, while weaker spatial imagers may rely on other routes, such as verbal knowledge.
Palombo and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Three healthy adults who cannot relive past events scored normally on most memory tests but poorly when recalling visual details. The authors suggest the problem lies in handling visual information within memory for one's own life.
Palombo and colleagues · Cortex
The authors built a self-report questionnaire about everyday memory for one's own life, the Survey of Autobiographical Memory, and tested it with 598 healthy adults in Toronto. Answers grouped into general good-or-poor memory factors plus separate factors for finding one's way and for imagining the future; memory for events and memory for facts did not separate, though the authors kept them as separate scores. People reporting past depression rated their memory for events lower, men rated their sense of direction higher, and scores related modestly to some laboratory memory tests. Shorter 26-item and 10-item versions are offered.