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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Hing and Sibley-White · Educating Young People for a Sustainable Future
Four university students with aphantasia said open creative tasks, holding several ideas in mind and putting things in order made school harder, and described strikingly similar strategies: talking things through, ready-made examples, ideally ones they could hold, and step-by-step plans. The authors argue for treating aphantasia as neurodiversity.
Lambert and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that anauralia and aphantasia share a 0.8% prevalence but have distinct psychological profiles. This suggests that the absence of sensory imagery is modality-specific rather than a single, unified condition.
Lambert and Sibley · Cortex
Replying to a call for one term covering absent imagery in every sense, the authors argue that "aphantasia" has come to mean absent visual imagery, so absent auditory imagery needs its own word, anauralia. In early data from about 15,000 New Zealand survey respondents, about 1% reported no visual imagery and 0.8% no auditory imagery. A few people lacked one kind of imagery while having vivid imagery of the other: 11 of 148 people who reported no visual imagery said they could hear imagined sounds as clearly as real ones.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
In a short reply within a debate over names, the authors argue for keeping one term, aphantasia, for absent or markedly reduced voluntary imagery in any sense, with a word added for the sense involved, such as visual or auditory aphantasia, or multisensory aphantasia when all senses are affected. They describe hyperphantasia as the opposite: imagery said to rival real perception. They note that many people with aphantasia report rare spontaneous flashes of imagery or imagery in dreams, and that lacking imagery does not mean lacking imagination.