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.
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.
Knight, Milton and Zeman · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasics showed normal visual working memory performance and decodable neural representations in the visual cortex. This suggests aphantasia is a lack of conscious awareness rather than an inability to generate or store visual information.
Delhaye and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia remembered which color went with which shape as well as typical imagers, even for hard-to-name shapes. The authors conclude that neither imagery nor verbal labels is necessary for this kind of memory.
Li and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In a phone navigation game, 63 people with aphantasia were slower than others on complex levels, with no clear gap on simple ones, and rated their own sense of direction lower. The authors suggest picturing a map helps most when there is a lot to remember.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
People with aphantasia recalled fewer letters than others from a grid flashed for 50 milliseconds, but not from one shown for 5 seconds. This suggests imagery helps hold a split-second visual trace, while other strategies work given more time.
Duckett and Simons · Neuropsychologia
In 60 adults, neither questionnaire imagery scores nor average vividness predicted memory for scenes, but memories rated more vivid than a person's own average were more often correct. Re-analyzed aphantasia data showed the same trial-level link.
Wantzen and Witt · L’Année psychologique
Aphantasics reported less frequent use of autobiographical memory for identity and directive purposes than controls. This suggests that a lack of mental imagery may alter how individuals utilize their personal past to guide future behavior and self-concept.
Hayes, Miles and Evans · New Ideas in Psychology
Five people with aphantasia described leaning on facts, a soundless inner voice, and notes, photos and other people to remember. The authors suggest these strategies help but only partly offset real memory difficulties.
McCormick and Lange · Frontiers in Cognition
This short review compares memory for personal events in aphantasia and in blindness. People with aphantasia recall fewer details of every kind and relive memories less, while the few small studies of blind people suggest their memories feel about as vivid as sighted people's, though they often need more prompting. The authors propose that building a mental scene matters more for vivid memory than having seen the world, and note that no study has yet tested scene building in people born blind.
Pauly-Takacs and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia recalled and recognized word lists as well as others and were just as prone to false memories. This suggests aphantasia neither weakens verbal memory nor protects against verbal false memories.
Speed, Geraerds and McRae · Memory & Cognition
Thirty people with aphantasia and 29 typical imagers decided whether one word named a physical part of another (is a mane part of a lion?). Both groups were equally fast and accurate, and both were slower, by a similar amount, when the wrong answers were related words, which forces a closer check. In that version, ratings of each part's perceptual features predicted response times in both groups, which the authors read as automatic, unconscious simulation that does not need conscious imagery, though an abstract, non-visual strategy is also possible. People with aphantasia may also lean more on word associations.
Thorudottir, Asgeirsson and Sigurdardottir
In this preprint, which had not been peer reviewed, 55 adults in Iceland tried to reproduce the exact colors of everyday objects seen a moment earlier or earlier in a long series, and matched colors shown on screen. How vividly people said they could picture things did not predict how precisely they remembered colors. In interviews, most people, whatever their imagery, said they named the colors to themselves in the short memory task, and in the longer task those who used words were more precise. Only nine participants had aphantasia, one of them with no imagery at all.
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.
Reeder and colleagues · Cognition
Aphantasics performed as well as typical imagers on a precise visual working memory task by using non-visual spatial and sensorimotor strategies. This demonstrates that mental imagery is not required for maintaining high-fidelity visual information.
Monzel and colleagues · eLife
People with aphantasia recalled fewer event, emotion and sensory details from their own lives than controls. During recall their hippocampus was less active, their visual cortex more active, and the two lacked the coupling seen in controls.
Bergmann and Ortiz-Tudela · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Researchers propose that aphantasia stems from specific deficits in high-level feedback signals along the visual "what" stream during memory retrieval. This suggests that memory impairments in aphantasia are tied to the inability to reinstate precise object features rather than a general episodic memory failure.
Beran and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Of 5,010 U.S. adults, 8.9% said they had no mental imagery, but only 1.5% scored in the aphantasia range on a standard questionnaire. This suggests estimates of how common aphantasia is depend on how it is measured.
Wittmann and Şatırer · Learning & Memory
People with aphantasia remembered which items went together as accurately as others but were less often highly confident. This suggests imagery contributes to memory confidence rather than accuracy.
Monzel, Vetterlein and Reuter · Journal of Neuropsychology
In an online study, 67 people with aphantasia and 32 people with more imagery, grouped by an imagery questionnaire, did four timed memory tasks: recalling spoken words, redrawing seven lines they had just seen, recognizing the earlier words in a longer list, and picking out and completing complex shapes seen earlier. The aphantasia group scored lower on average, by a small to moderate margin, and the gap did not differ reliably between tasks. The authors suggest imagery supports memory even for words, but the study was not preregistered and they note that missing imagery may not be the direct cause.
Keogh, Wicken and Pearson · Cortex
People with aphantasia remembered visual patterns as well as people with imagery, but reported non-visual strategies such as labeling. This suggests imagery is only one of several tools people can use to hold visual information in mind.