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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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.
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.
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.
Suggate, Milton and Tree · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia were more accurate but slower than controls on multimodal mental comparison tasks. This suggests that sensory cognition can be successfully achieved through propositional rather than imagistic strategies.
Noble and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In brain scans of 58 people, more vivid imagery was weakly linked to more complex activity in the lower temporal lobes, and not only while imagining. The authors speculate that excess neural noise may underlie aphantasia.
Milton · Current Biology
This short commentary discusses two brain-imaging studies, published together in 2024, in which people listened to everyday sounds. In one, the kind of sound could be read from typical imagers' primary visual cortex but not from aphantasic people's when they tried to imagine it, yet it could be read when they simply listened, though they reported no imagery. In the other, it could mostly not be read from aphantasic people's early visual areas. Both studies propose that weaker feedback from higher brain areas to the visual cortex may explain this.
Milton and colleagues · Cerebral Cortex Communications
People with aphantasia matched others on standard memory tests but recalled fewer details of past events and imagined scenes. The authors suggest weaker links between frontal control areas and visual areas may explain the missing imagery.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
Questionnaires from 2,000 people with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia linked aphantasia to science jobs and self-reported poor memory of past events, hyperphantasia to creative jobs. Imagery extremes appear tied to wider traits.
Fulford and colleagues · Cortex
Low-vividness imagers activate a more widespread set of brain regions during visualization than high-vividness imagers. This suggests that individuals with weak mental imagery may use compensatory neural effort to perform imagery tasks.