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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Pounder and colleagues · PLOS ONE
Twenty-nine people with aphantasia and 30 typical imagers did two tasks thought to need sound imagery: judging, from imagination alone, whether one syllable of a familiar song is sung higher than another, and sorting blended voices between two speakers. Most of the aphantasia group also reported little or no ability to imagine sounds, yet the groups did not clearly differ on either task, even among those reporting the weakest sound imagery. The authors suggest people may solve such tasks another way, for example by treating pitch as height, or that the tasks were not sensitive enough.
Mehling and colleagues · PLOS ONE
The authors added five items to a 32-item questionnaire about awareness of body sensations, the MAIA, making the 37-item MAIA-2, and tested it with 1,090 adult visitors to the Science Museum in London. The eight-part structure held. The part about distracting oneself from discomfort became clearly more reliable, while the part about worrying over discomfort improved only against some earlier samples. Two parts still fall slightly short of the usual standard, and the questionnaire relies on self-report, with no objective measure to check it against.
Keogh and Pearson · PLoS ONE
In about 35 students, those whose imagery more strongly biased what they saw next in a binocular rivalry test were also more accurate at holding a pattern in memory, while imagery strength was unrelated to very brief visual memory. In a second group of 17, a bright background while holding or imagining a pattern hurt the memory and imagery of the 7 strong imagers but not of the weaker imagers, who still did the memory task well. The authors conclude that strong imagers use imagery to hold visual information and weak imagers rely on other strategies.
Kobayashi and colleagues · PLoS ONE
In a brain recording study of nine adults recalling the taste of foods named on a screen, the brain's taste area became active in seven people, and in five of them a frontal area became active first. When the foods were shown as pictures, the taste area was active in six people but the frontal area in only one. The authors take this as support for the idea that frontal areas start taste imagery by calling up taste memories.