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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Scholz and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that aphantasics activate sensory precursors that lack the perceptual geometry of true imagery. This suggests aphantasia is a failure of multi-stage integration rather than just a lack of neural reactivation.
Scholz and Scholz · International Mad Studies Journal
Researchers found that biomedical and cognitive studies often frame aphantasia as a disorder or deficit, ignoring the lived experiences of aphantasics. This highlights the need for more inclusive research that avoids pathologizing neurodiversity.
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.
Scholz, Monzel and Liu · Current Biology
Neural activity in aphantasia during imagery tasks lacks the perception-like representational overlap found in typical imagers. This suggests that neural activity in aphantasics reflects alternative non-perceptual strategies rather than unconscious mental imagery.
Scholz · Mind & Language
This commentary on a recent book about mental imagery argues that people with aphantasia do not have hidden, unconscious imagery, contrary to the book's proposal. Two recent brain scan studies it reviews found that their visual areas carry information when they try to imagine, but not in the same form as when seeing, which points to other strategies. Because those studies tested deliberate imagery, the commentary leaves open whether automatic imagery, for example set off by sounds, occurs without awareness; it notes evidence on both sides.
Nanay · Mind & Language
This short reply to three commentaries on a 2023 book about mental imagery restates the book's view that aphantasia is not a single condition: many people with it still dream in images or have flashbacks but cannot call up images at will, which differs from having no conscious imagery at all. Most of the reply concerns other questions, chiefly how the book's idea that imagery forms part of everyday seeing differs from predictive processing theories, and how philosophy can work with the sciences of the mind. It reports no new data.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
This short definition, published in a special issue of the journal Cortex, describes aphantasia as the absence or near-absence of imagery, most often the inability to picture things while fully awake, as opposed to simply thinking about them. Aphantasia affects deliberate imagery, may affect spontaneous imagery, and often leaves imagery in dreams intact. It can be lifelong or acquired, and the note proposes labels such as visual, auditory, multisensory and global aphantasia, while recording that some researchers keep the word for vision alone.