Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Stevenson and Case · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
This review asks whether people can imagine smells. Reports from hallucinations, dreams and questionnaires suggest smell images do occur, but people rate smell the hardest sense to imagine, and many lab results could come from knowledge or words rather than images; only one study ruled out every alternative. The authors argue that the main problem is calling up a smell from its name, since links between words and smells are weak, and predict that training people to link odors with names or other cues would make smell images easier to form.
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