Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Takahashi, Omura and Sugimura · Neuropsychologia
Older adults reported more vivid visual and multisensory imagery, while aphantasia was more prevalent in younger groups. This suggests that age should be considered when identifying aphantasia and setting diagnostic thresholds.
Takahashi and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
In an online survey of 2,871 Japanese adults, 3.7% had low scores on a standard imagery questionnaire, but 12.1% said they could not, or could barely, picture things such as furniture or a friend's face, and the two groups overlapped poorly. A second survey of 774 adults suggested part of the gap comes from people with poor face recognition answering the face part of the question. Among those with low questionnaire scores, some reported weak imagery in every sense and others mainly in vision, so the authors recommend using several measures, including other senses.
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Takahashi and colleagues
Researchers found that aphantasia often involves a lack of imagery across multiple senses, not just vision. This highlights the importance of using multi-sensory assessments to fully capture the diverse experiences of those with aphantasia.