Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Thorudottir, Asgeirsson and Sigurdardottir
In this preprint, which had not been peer reviewed, 55 adults in Iceland tried to reproduce the exact colors of everyday objects seen a moment earlier or earlier in a long series, and matched colors shown on screen. How vividly people said they could picture things did not predict how precisely they remembered colors. In interviews, most people, whatever their imagery, said they named the colors to themselves in the short memory task, and in the longer task those who used words were more precise. Only nine participants had aphantasia, one of them with no imagery at all.
Thorudottir and colleagues · Brain Sciences
An architect who said his imagery had been vivid lost almost all of it after a stroke on both sides of the back of the brain, scoring close to the lowest possible score on an imagery questionnaire. He also had trouble recognizing faces and seeing colors, yet four other stroke patients, including another architect, kept their imagery although their test results largely overlapped with his. Brain scans showed only small areas in the right lingual gyrus and left fusiform gyrus damaged in him alone, so the authors propose these, especially the left fusiform area, as candidate regions for visual imagery.
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