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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Arnold and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Researchers propose an Emergent Property Framework where imagery arises from coordinated activity across a network of brain regions. This explains why aphantasia presents with diverse multisensory profiles and varying cognitive impacts.
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.
Bouyer and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In three student samples, the link between autistic traits and imagery vividness came mostly from autism-questionnaire items about imagination. The authors conclude that any link between imagery vividness and autistic traits is likely weak.
Bouyer and colleagues · Cognition
Researchers found that while mental imagery can bias which image dominates during binocular rivalry, it does not objectively improve the detection of probes within those images. This suggests that imagery priming may reflect a subjective decision bias rather than a true increase in visual sensitivity.
Arnold and colleagues · Cortex
Among university students, those who rated their imagery as less vivid were less likely to picture something, like a pink elephant, when told not to. This suggests weaker imagery may bring more resistance to unwanted images.
Schwarzkopf · Cortex
This opinion piece suggests that imagery may differ not only in vividness but in where it is experienced: some people may see images placed in the world in front of them, while others have clear images that feel "inside" or "off-screen" rather than in view. It calls the evidence for these types anecdotal so far, and allows that a single vividness scale might still explain them. It argues that vividness questionnaires are too vague and may wrongly class some people as aphantasic, and calls for tasks that measure the detail of imagery more directly.
Jacobs, Schwarzkopf and Silvanto · Cortex
A woman with lifelong aphantasia was compared with 11 women with typical imagery on memory tests. She was as accurate as them on a task meant to need imagery, judging whether a dot fell inside a shape that was named but not shown, though she was worse than IQ-matched controls at telling her right answers from her wrong ones. She did worse only on the hardest trials of a matching visual memory task. The authors suggest she uses other strategies that work in most conditions but lose out when fine visual detail is needed; this is a single case.