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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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.
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.
Cavalli and Plancher · L’Année psychologique
Introducing a special issue, the editors call aphantasia multifaceted, with memory differences in some areas and preserved abilities in others. They suggest it invites cognitive science to build individual differences into models of the mind.
Delem and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that individuals with aphantasia scored lower across all sensory imagery modalities but performed similarly to controls on spatial and cognitive tasks. This suggests that multisensory imagery deficits do not hinder general cognitive or spatial reasoning abilities.
Purkart and colleagues · Cognition
People with aphantasia did not show priming effects in tasks requiring mental imagery, unlike typical imagers. This provides objective behavioral evidence that aphantasia involves a genuine lack of both conscious and unconscious mental imagery.