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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.
Monzel and colleagues · Behavior Research Methods
Using existing data from 111 people, 38 classed as having little or no imagery, the authors propose a new way to score a test in which imagining a colored pattern makes it more likely to be seen when each eye sees a different pattern. Counting trials where people saw a mix, instead of dropping them, made the score agree better with self-reported imagery, but only when few clear trials were recorded. The score explained about a tenth of the variation in self-reports, and the authors judge it better at separating groups than individuals and too weak to classify one person.
Monzel and colleagues · Cognition
Aphantasics showed a reduced Stroop effect for accuracy compared to controls, though response times remained similar. This suggests that mental imagery contributes to the interference between words and colors by competing with actual perception.
Monzel and colleagues · Psychophysiology
People with aphantasia achieved successful fear extinction through propositional thought despite lacking mental imagery. This suggests that imaginal exposure therapy may be effective for aphantasic individuals by relying on non-visual cognitive processes.
Monzel, Karneboge and Reuter · Biomarkers in Neuropsychiatry
Aphantasia is linked to reduced physiological and self-reported sympathy for verbal scenarios and slower emotion recognition in others. This suggests mental imagery is a key mechanism for amplifying emotional and empathic responses.
Monzel and colleagues · eLife
People with aphantasia recalled fewer event, emotion and sensory details from their own lives than controls. During recall their hippocampus was less active, their visual cortex more active, and the two lacked the coupling seen in controls.
Vetterlein and colleagues · Neurobiology of Pain
In a brain-scanning study of 82 healthy adults, people imagined themselves in everyday painful situations, such as burning a lip on a hot drink, and matched painless ones, shown as pictures or text. Imagining pain raised activity in frontal, motor, body-sensing and parietal areas and the cerebellum, regions earlier studies link to pain, and also in visual areas. Pain sensitivity and sense of control did not predict this activity. With no real-pain comparison, the authors call the evidence for shared brain activity between imagined and felt pain preliminary, and imagery ability was not measured.
Monzel, Handlogten and Reuter · Cognition
People with aphantasia do not experience the verbal overshadowing effect, which typically impairs face recognition after verbal description. This suggests that visual mental imagery is a necessary component for this memory interference to occur.
Monzel, Karneboge and Reuter · Journal of Neuroscience Research
Researchers are investigating whether transiently reducing dopamine synthesis through an amino acid mixture decreases the strength of voluntary mental imagery. This study could reveal the neurochemical basis of aphantasia and identify potential targets for imagery-enhancing interventions.
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.
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.
Monzel and colleagues · Psychophysiology
This is the published plan for a study, accepted before data collection, so it reports no results. It set out to test whether people need to picture a feared object for their fear to fade while they imagine it, comparing 30 people with aphantasia, 30 typical imagers with eyes closed and 30 typical imagers staring at a bright screen to dampen their imagery. Fear was to be measured through skin responses after people learned to link one of two pictures with an electric shock. A separate 2025 paper reported the results: the fear faded in all three groups.
Monzel, Vetterlein and Reuter · Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
Aphantasia met only the rarity criterion for a mental disorder: memory differences and distress were too mild on average. But about a third reported clinically relevant distress, so the authors advise assessing individual cases.
Monzel, Keidel and Reuter · Journal of Research in Personality
People with aphantasia scored lower on empathy when distressing scenes were described in words, but not when they were shown as photos. This suggests written empathy tests may partly measure imagery rather than empathy.
Monzel, Vetterlein and Reuter · Journal of Neuropsychology
In an online study, 67 people with aphantasia and 32 people with more imagery, grouped by an imagery questionnaire, did four timed memory tasks: recalling spoken words, redrawing seven lines they had just seen, recognizing the earlier words in a longer list, and picking out and completing complex shapes seen earlier. The aphantasia group scored lower on average, by a small to moderate margin, and the gap did not differ reliably between tasks. The authors suggest imagery supports memory even for words, but the study was not preregistered and they note that missing imagery may not be the direct cause.
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.