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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lambert and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that anauralia and aphantasia share a 0.8% prevalence but have distinct psychological profiles. This suggests that the absence of sensory imagery is modality-specific rather than a single, unified condition.
Yan, Roberts and Bainbridge · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasic individuals showed a robust picture superiority effect and recalled symbols better than pictures. This challenges dual-coding theory by demonstrating that visual imagery is not essential for the memory advantages of image-based stimuli.
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.
Scholz and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that aphantasics activate sensory precursors that lack the perceptual geometry of true imagery. This suggests aphantasia is a failure of multi-stage integration rather than just a lack of neural reactivation.
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.
Le Clézio and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In an online reasoning task, 57 typical imagers were about 2.4 seconds slower on problems built on visual relations, such as cleaner or dirtier, than on spatial problems or ones that are hard to picture, repeating an earlier finding that visual content can slow reasoning. The 47 people with weak or no imagery were also slower on visual problems, by about 1.7 seconds, but less clearly, and whether the two groups truly differed was unclear. Accuracy did not clearly differ between groups.
Speed, Mak and McRae · Neuropsychologia
In two online experiments, 68 people with aphantasia and over 100 typical imagers read short sentences and judged whether a pictured object had been named. Both groups were slower when the picture's color clashed with the color the sentence implied (a dog hard to find in mud is likely brown), and the slowing was, if anything, larger in the aphantasia group. Neither group was affected by implied distance. The authors read this as automatic, unconscious simulation during reading that does not need conscious imagery, though they say other strategies still need ruling out.
Vanbuckhave and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Pupillometry showed that imagined brightness modulates pupil size, but these changes did not correlate with individual self-reported imagery vividness. This suggests a dissociation between subjective reports and objective physiological measures of imagery.
Lorenzatti · Neuropsychologia
This review tests four explanations of aphantasia against five brain imaging studies that compared aphantasic people with typical imagers. Because every study found brain differences, it rules out, as general explanations, the ideas that aphantasic people only describe their experience differently or fail to notice images they have. Of the two left, that image-like representations form but are hard to access, or that they never properly form, the second fits somewhat better, though much of its support depends on which model of how the brain makes images proves right.
Bartolomeo, Liu and Spagna · Neuropsychologia
The Fusiform Imagery Node (FIN) in the left hemisphere is a key hub for generating mental images across different domains. This suggests that aphantasia may result from impaired communication between the FIN and the prefrontal cortex.
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.
Liu · Neuropsychologia
A theory paper proposes that conscious imagery passes through three attention-driven stages: generation, integration and amplification. In this still-untested model, aphantasia spares generation but impairs integration and amplification.
Kvamme and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Among people with aphantasia, those with more (though still weak) imagery reported more alexithymia and anxiety, the reverse of typical imagers. The authors suggest faint imagery may prompt emotional processing that fails.
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.
Gao, Nagai and Silvanto · Neuropsychologia
People who lost their mental imagery reported more childhood trauma, anxiety, heart and breathing symptoms, and ADHD and autism traits than typical imagers. This suggests acquired aphantasia can follow emotional pathways as well as brain injury.