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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Vetterlein and colleagues · Neurobiology of Pain
In a brain-scanning study of 82 healthy adults, people imagined themselves in everyday painful situations, such as burning a lip on a hot drink, and matched painless ones, shown as pictures or text. Imagining pain raised activity in frontal, motor, body-sensing and parietal areas and the cerebellum, regions earlier studies link to pain, and also in visual areas. Pain sensitivity and sense of control did not predict this activity. With no real-pain comparison, the authors call the evidence for shared brain activity between imagined and felt pain preliminary, and imagery ability was not measured.
Monzel and colleagues · Perception
People with aphantasia performed worse than controls on both face and object recognition tasks. This suggests that a lack of mental imagery may lead to broader visual recognition deficits beyond just faces.
Monzel, Vetterlein and Reuter · Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
Aphantasia met only the rarity criterion for a mental disorder: memory differences and distress were too mild on average. But about a third reported clinically relevant distress, so the authors advise assessing individual cases.
Monzel, Vetterlein and Reuter · Journal of Neuropsychology
In an online study, 67 people with aphantasia and 32 people with more imagery, grouped by an imagery questionnaire, did four timed memory tasks: recalling spoken words, redrawing seven lines they had just seen, recognizing the earlier words in a longer list, and picking out and completing complex shapes seen earlier. The aphantasia group scored lower on average, by a small to moderate margin, and the gap did not differ reliably between tasks. The authors suggest imagery supports memory even for words, but the study was not preregistered and they note that missing imagery may not be the direct cause.