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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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.
New and colleagues · Cortex
Aphantasia is linked to higher rates of neurodevelopmental, neurological, and psychiatric disorders compared to typical imagery. This highlights the need for multisensory evaluations and tailored interventions for neurodiverse profiles.
Lebon · Cortex
Individuals with aphantasia show decodable activity in early visual cortices during imagery tasks despite lacking conscious visual experience. This suggests that neural activation in V1 does not necessarily equate to subjective mental imagery.
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.
Seiler, Newman-Norlund and Monsma · Psychology of Sport and Exercise
Thirty-seven young women who rated their movement imagery as good or poor imagined a simple arm movement in a brain scanner, either feeling it, seeing it through their own eyes, or watching themselves from outside. Both groups used much the same brain network. In direct comparisons of each kind of imagery, the groups differed only when watching from outside, where good imagers showed more activity in motor areas and the cerebellum. The authors call the differences small, and the study's threshold was not corrected for the many brain areas tested.
Jung, Flores and Hunter · Frontiers in Psychology
Eighty young adults spent about two weeks on an online task, writing down goals, imagined scenes and inventions over four sessions and then rating their engagement, satisfaction and progress; those ten ratings make up the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire. Higher scores went with a larger hippocampus and lingual gyrus and a smaller nucleus accumbens and parts of the default mode network, but not with overall creative achievement. The questionnaire asks how people felt about their own ideas and the task rather than measuring imagery, and the brain links are exploratory.
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.
Pearson · Current Directions in Psychological Science
A short review of two newer ways to study mental imagery: reading imagined content from brain scans, and a test in which imagining one of two patterns makes it more likely to be seen when each eye sees a different pattern. On that test, imagery acts like weak seeing: bright light weakens it, it matches the imagined position and orientation, and people can tell which of their images were strong. Imagery strength stayed the same over five days of hour-long practice, and strong imagers seem to use imagery for short-term visual memory while people without it use other strategies.