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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Nedergaard and Lupyan · Psychological Science
People reporting little inner speech (anendophasia) recalled fewer words and judged picture rhymes less accurately, with no difference in task switching. The gaps vanished among those who said they talked out loud.
Pace, Koenig-Robert and Pearson · Psychological Science
Mental imagery reversed the suppressive effects of visual adaptation, unlike weak perception which increased them. This suggests that imagery and perception rely on different neural mechanisms, with imagery likely acting through inhibitory modulation.
Kwok and colleagues · Psychological Science
Suppressed visual thoughts form sensory traces in the early visual cortex even when individuals report successful suppression. This provides an objective way to measure how nonconscious representations trigger thought-control failure.
Pearson · Current Directions in Psychological Science
Mental imagery and visual working memory involve overlapping sensory representations in the early visual cortex. This suggests that voluntary imagery literally takes on a pictorial format of visual information within the brain.
Laeng and Sulutvedt · Psychological Science
Pupils narrowed when people imagined bright shapes or scenes and widened for dark ones, even while they looked at a plain gray screen. The authors conclude that mental images carry the brightness of the original perception.
Pearson, Rademaker and Tong · Psychological Science
Subjective vividness ratings reliably predict an image's impact on subsequent perception. This suggests that individuals have accurate metacognitive insight into the sensory strength of their mental imagery.