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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Takamura and colleagues · Cortex
Aphantasic individuals showed eye movement patterns similar to visualizers when exploring mental maps despite reporting no subjective imagery. This suggests aphantasia may reflect reduced metacognitive access to imagery rather than a total absence of representational content.
Bartolomeo, Liu and Spagna · Neuropsychologia
The Fusiform Imagery Node (FIN) in the left hemisphere is a key hub for generating mental images across different domains. This suggests that aphantasia may result from impaired communication between the FIN and the prefrontal cortex.
Liu and colleagues · Cortex
In a 7-tesla brain imaging study of 10 people with aphantasia and 10 typical imagers, attempted imagery activated similar visual areas in both groups. In aphantasia, a key imagery region was less connected with frontal and parietal areas.
Spagna and colleagues · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
This meta-analysis pooled 46 brain-scan experiments from 41 studies of healthy adults, 27 of them on visual imagery. Imagining consistently raised activity in a small area of the left fusiform gyrus and in frontal and parietal areas used for attention and working memory, while a statistical test found evidence that early visual cortex, where seeing begins, was not consistently engaged. The authors propose that frontal and parietal networks start and hold images using stored knowledge in the left temporal lobe, and suggest aphantasia may reflect a disconnection of memory areas from this network. The analysis included no aphantasia group.