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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Schelp and Lambert · Auditory Perception & Cognition
In an online survey of 344 people, recruited partly through aphantasia and neurodiversity forums, those with no mind's ear (who cannot imagine sounds) or no inner voice scored lower on unusual experiences and beliefs linked to psychosis risk, and people who reported no visual imagery scored very slightly lower. Those with no mind's ear also scored a little higher on withdrawal and loss of interest. A very vivid mind's ear went with slightly more unusual experiences, while a very vivid inner voice made no difference. Effects ranged from very small to medium, and all measures were self-report questionnaires.
McVay and Mooring · Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education
In interviews with ten biochemistry students and two instructors at one US university, students mostly described visualization as drawn structures, pathways and reaction mechanisms, while instructors meant picturing molecules in the mind. Two students said they had aphantasia and described workarounds, such as reasoning in words or writing out memorized structures just before exams; one reported no improvement in picturing but had not tried any exercises. The authors suggest instructors teach several ways to do visual tasks and be clearer about the representations they use and why they matter.
Anderson and colleagues · Neuron
Mental imagery and perception overlap in transmodal association networks rather than unimodal sensory areas. This suggests that high-level brain systems, not just sensory reinstatement, are the primary drivers of mental imagery.
Tolman · Auditory Perception & Cognition
Three classically trained musicians who report no inner hearing, a pianist and two singers, were interviewed about how they learn and rehearse music. They described relying on the feel of their hands, voice and breath, on memory of the written score, on silent syllables or number codes, and on music theory, and none had noticed their lack of inner hearing when they began training. The author suggests inner hearing may not be needed for several kinds of musical reasoning and rehearsal, and that teaching should offer other routes, though the study rests on interviews and did not measure performance.
Tomastikova and Silson · Cortex
Researchers found that mental imagery of people, but not buildings, significantly primed subsequent perception in a binocular rivalry task. This suggests that the functional impact of imagery on perception is category-specific rather than a universal effect.
Hubbard · Auditory Perception & Cognition
This review questions the usual line between the mind's ear (imagining outside sounds) and the inner voice (imagining one's own voice), which holds that only the inner voice carries movement information. Brain and muscle studies find movement-related activity when people imagine melodies and instrument sounds too, so the review argues that line does not hold. It suggests widening the inner voice to any sound a person makes, and separating the two by whether a sound is mapped to meaning or to action. It also asks whether someone without auditory imagery could keep its movement side.
Wymark and colleagues · Journal of the Neurological Sciences
In this conference abstract, people with aphantasia, average imagers and very vivid imagers did a task that tests whether imagining something gets in the way of seeing it. The more vivid a group's imagery, the more imagining hurt accuracy, by about 9 percent in the vivid group, while the aphantasia group was slightly more accurate on imagery trials. Brain recordings also differed between the groups. The authors argue aphantasia is a different way of processing rather than a deficit, but the abstract does not say how many people took part.
Welker and colleagues · Scientific Reports
Eighty-nine young adults, mostly psychology students, watched two patterns moving in opposite directions, one shown to each eye, while eye tracking revealed which one they were seeing. Beforehand they either pictured the moving pattern or silently repeated its direction. Picturing it tilted what people then saw only in those with typical or vivid imagery, and more so the more vivid their imagery, while repeating the direction worked across the range, including in people with low imagery, though only modestly for them. Only 4 participants had aphantasia, which the authors propose renaming an abstract simulation style.
Bilzer and Monzel · Vision
In an online survey, 226 adults rated how vivid their imagery is for sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, body sensation and emotion, when imagining on purpose and in recent dreams; 158 repeated it four weeks later. Ratings for each sense were linked across waking imagery and dreams, but ratings were more closely linked within each state than across them, so the two are related but partly separate. Dreams felt more emotional, while sound, smell, taste and touch were weaker in dreams. The link between waking and dream imagery was stronger in people who often recall dreams or have lucid dreams.
Kronemer and colleagues · Neuroscience of Consciousness
Researchers found that visual imagery vividness positively correlates with the contrast and sharpness of negative afterimages. This suggests that afterimages and mental imagery may share top-down neural mechanisms in the brain.
Dawes, Keogh and Pearson · Neuroscience Research
Aphantasia is not a uniform condition but consists of distinct sub-groups, including those with purely visual deficits and others with multi-sensory impairments. This highlights the need for multi-sensory screening to better understand individual cognitive profiles.
Monzel and Reuter · Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
In an online test, people with aphantasia took longer than controls to find objects in busy hidden-object pictures (8.95 versus 7.46 seconds), though no one was asked to visualize. More vivid imagery went with faster search.
Liu and Bartolomeo · Cortex
People with aphantasia were as accurate as typical and vivid imagers on imagery and perception tasks, but slower. The authors suggest visual knowledge is still reached without a conscious image, or through other strategies.
Monzel and colleagues · Perception
People with aphantasia performed worse than controls on both face and object recognition tasks. This suggests that a lack of mental imagery may lead to broader visual recognition deficits beyond just faces.
Sulfaro, Robinson and Carlson · Neuroscience of Consciousness
Researchers found that sensory input competes with mental imagery in a hierarchical neural network, preventing thoughts from dominating low-level sensory regions. This explains why mental imagery feels less vivid than real perception and how aphantasia arises from overweighted bottom-up signals.
Sulfaro, Robinson and Carlson
Researchers found that competition from real-world sensory input prevents mental images from becoming fully visible hallucinations. This suggests that the "quasi-sensory" nature of imagery is a direct result of perceptual interference.
Furman and colleagues · Neurocase
A 35-year-old man with lifelong aphantasia scored in the normal range or above on standard tests and high on mental rotation, which he said he solved with a body-based, non-visual strategy. His EEG was recorded as he looked at a face and then tried to picture it. For picturing, estimated brain activity began in left temporal rather than frontal areas, with no significant activity in rear visual areas or in a parietal area linked to imagery within 300 milliseconds. It is a single case with no comparison person, which the authors call only a first step.
Dance, Ward and Simner · Perception
Aphantasics reported significantly lower sensory sensitivity and multi-sensory imagery deficits compared to controls. This suggests aphantasia is a widespread multi-sensory condition rather than one limited to visual imagery.
Monzel, Keidel and Reuter · Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
In an online task, people who reported aphantasia were slightly slower than others to pick out a pictured object they had been asked to imagine, but not a written word. The authors conclude imagery-guided attention is reduced in aphantasia.
Cabrera and colleagues · International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research
Researchers tested a short form of the Body Perception Questionnaire, which asks how often people notice body sensations and have organ reactions such as indigestion, in 1,320 people from online samples in Spain and the US and a US college class. Body awareness formed one factor, while bodily reactivity split into organs above and below the diaphragm, and the scales were reliable and related as expected to other questionnaires. Women and people reporting a psychiatric diagnosis scored higher. Because every measure was self-report, the authors say links to actual nervous system activity still need testing.