Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Punton and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Across two Edinburgh book festivals and an online sample (about 870 readers in all), researchers built a short questionnaire on how people imagine while reading. It picked out four strands: seeing scenes and spaces, the voice and wording of the text, modeling characters, and the reader's point of view, though the last was weakly measured. The scenes-and-spaces strand tracked vivid visual imagery most closely, and both it and character modeling went with feeling absorbed in stories. The study did not look at people with aphantasia separately.
Schwarzkopf and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Vividness ratings robustly capture a wide range of subjective experiences, from internal mental depictions to externally projected imagery. This suggests aphantasia should be redefined to distinguish between faint imagery and a total lack of pictorial representation.
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Dando and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Eyewitnesses with aphantasia recalled fewer correct details of a filmed crime than typical imagers but made no more errors. They recalled least when asked to picture the scene, which suggests imagery-based interviews may not suit them.