Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Want to take part? See the studies you can join.
Running a study? We can help you recruit participants.
Arnold and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Researchers propose an Emergent Property Framework where imagery arises from coordinated activity across a network of brain regions. This explains why aphantasia presents with diverse multisensory profiles and varying cognitive impacts.
Takamura and colleagues · Cortex
Aphantasic individuals showed eye movement patterns similar to visualizers when exploring mental maps despite reporting no subjective imagery. This suggests aphantasia may reflect reduced metacognitive access to imagery rather than a total absence of representational content.
McCormick · International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring
In a composite case of a senior lawyer with aphantasia, a coach kept mainly to non-visual methods, such as career stories, four values words, goals and daily habits, and she said she had made some useful progress. The author suggests other coaches do the same, though the case never tried a visualization exercise.
Zhong and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers analyzed free-text comments from 25 autistic and 25 non-autistic adults with aphantasia, matched for age, who answered one open-ended question at the end of an online survey. Comments fell under imagery, thinking, and emotions and social life; more non-autistic people mentioned imagery in other senses, mostly describing it as intact, while more autistic people described themselves as thinking in words. Many described memories as known facts rather than relived scenes, and some described knowing an emotion without feeling it. The group differences rest on small numbers and a single question.
Punton and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Across two Edinburgh book festivals and an online sample (about 870 readers in all), researchers built a short questionnaire on how people imagine while reading. It picked out four strands: seeing scenes and spaces, the voice and wording of the text, modeling characters, and the reader's point of view, though the last was weakly measured. The scenes-and-spaces strand tracked vivid visual imagery most closely, and both it and character modeling went with feeling absorbed in stories. The study did not look at people with aphantasia separately.
Baade and colleagues · Chemistry Education Research and Practice
Students who reported more vivid spatial imagery answered more stereochemistry questions correctly, while visual imagery vividness showed no such link. This suggests visual vividness alone does not capture the imagery these tasks draw on.
Schelp and Lambert · Auditory Perception & Cognition
In an online survey of 344 people, recruited partly through aphantasia and neurodiversity forums, those with no mind's ear (who cannot imagine sounds) or no inner voice scored lower on unusual experiences and beliefs linked to psychosis risk, and people who reported no visual imagery scored very slightly lower. Those with no mind's ear also scored a little higher on withdrawal and loss of interest. A very vivid mind's ear went with slightly more unusual experiences, while a very vivid inner voice made no difference. Effects ranged from very small to medium, and all measures were self-report questionnaires.
Hing and Sibley-White · Educating Young People for a Sustainable Future
Four university students with aphantasia said open creative tasks, holding several ideas in mind and putting things in order made school harder, and described strikingly similar strategies: talking things through, ready-made examples, ideally ones they could hold, and step-by-step plans. The authors argue for treating aphantasia as neurodiversity.
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.
Jablonka and Cohen · Trends Open
Researchers propose aphantasia represents an extreme evolutionary trade-off where the brain hyperoptimizes for abstract semantics by suppressing metabolically expensive visual recall. This suggests aphantasia may have facilitated the cultural transition to abstract writing systems.
Stewart and Brick Taft · Journal of the International Society for Teacher Education
In one school, 13.8% of 94 fourth graders scored in the aphantasia range and 27.7% in the hyperphantasia range, both above adult estimates. The authors suggest teachers offer strategies that do not rely on picturing.
Loo and Buchsbaum · Consciousness and Cognition
Aphantasic individuals showed a greater accuracy drop than controls when backward masking disrupted visual pattern completion. This suggests that aphantasia involves weakened recurrent neural processing that affects both imagery and perception.
Deery · Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
This philosophy paper asks how Merleau-Ponty's ideas would explain the perception-like feel of mental images. It argues that neither the view of images as perceptual representations nor the view of them as simulations explains that feel, and proposes instead that imagining something means partly taking up the bodily stance one would have if it were really there, bringing a vague sense of how it could look. In a footnote, the author suggests that people with aphantasia keep this capacity for perception but cannot use it on purpose to make absent things appear, while calling aphantasia beyond the paper's scope.
Kleider-Offutt and Meacham · Psychology, Crime & Law
In an online study of 323 students and volunteers, describing a perpetrator's face after a crime video went with slightly better lineup choices, not the worse choices older studies predicted. The 16 people with weak or no visual imagery picked as accurately as everyone else, and they did better after describing the face (46% against 33% correct), but with eight people in each condition this is a pattern to test again rather than a finding. The authors suggest people without imagery may lean on words to remember faces.
Cleary and colleagues · Neurocase
Researchers found that a 16-year-old with HSAM exhibited typical visual imagery vividness but significantly higher rates of involuntary memories. This suggests that superior memory may be driven by retrieval frequency rather than imagery ability.
Tooming and Jakapi · Neuropsychologia
This philosophy paper examines David Hume's theory that we form general ideas, such as the idea of a triangle, by calling up one mental image and letting it stand for others of its kind. The authors argue that people with severe aphantasia think abstractly without being able to use images this way, a challenge for Hume, though they admit this inability still needs testing. They reject four possible replies, including unconscious and spatial imagery, and conclude that theories grounding higher thought in mental images must account for aphantasia.
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.
Pimentel Aldaz and Spence · Multisensory Research
In an online study, 249 UK adults (almost all women) listened to short piano pieces in each of the seven Western musical modes and wrote down the scenes and smells each piece brought to mind. Major modes tended to bring up nature, daytime and flowers; minor modes brought up darkness, stress, damp and smoke, and people grouped the pieces along the same line. The study was exploratory and did not measure how well each person could imagine.
Takahashi, Omura and Sugimura · Neuropsychologia
Older adults reported more vivid visual and multisensory imagery, while aphantasia was more prevalent in younger groups. This suggests that age should be considered when identifying aphantasia and setting diagnostic thresholds.
Monzel and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
VVIQ items showed high redundancy for identifying aphantasia, with inter-item correlations ranging from .79 to .90. A single screening question about visualizing a familiar place achieved high specificity (98.8%) and sensitivity (97.5%) against the strictest definition of core aphantasia (VVIQ = 16), suggesting the full 16-item questionnaire is unnecessary for screening purposes.