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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Bartolomeo · Annual Review of Vision Science
Congenital aphantasia likely stems from impaired access to intact visual representations rather than a total lack of mental content. This suggests conscious visualization is an emergent property of large-scale network coordination.
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.
Keogh and colleagues · Journal of Vision
Individuals with aphantasia reported experiencing the neon color spreading illusion less intensely than those with visual imagery. This suggests that visual imagery and the neon color illusion may share overlapping neural feedback mechanisms.
Bilzer and Monzel · Vision
In an online survey, 226 adults rated how vivid their imagery is for sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, body sensation and emotion, when imagining on purpose and in recent dreams; 158 repeated it four weeks later. Ratings for each sense were linked across waking imagery and dreams, but ratings were more closely linked within each state than across them, so the two are related but partly separate. Dreams felt more emotional, while sound, smell, taste and touch were weaker in dreams. The link between waking and dream imagery was stronger in people who often recall dreams or have lucid dreams.
Dijkstra · Vision
The early visual cortex represents fine-grained visual details during mental imagery in a similar way to perception. This suggests that the recruitment of these areas depends on the level of visual detail required by the mental image.
Marks · Vision
Researchers synthesized historical and contemporary data to create a 16-descriptor template for visual mental imagery. This provides a normative standard to better understand individual differences in imagery vividness and clinical conditions.
Prasad, Megla and Bainbridge · Journal of Vision
Aphantasics show significant neural overlap with typical imagers during memory recall despite reporting no visual imagery. This suggests that aphantasia may involve a disruption in conscious access to visual information rather than a total absence of it.
Keogh and Pearson · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
In binocular rivalry tests, people with aphantasia were primed by attending to a visible striped pattern but showed no sign of attentional templates when it was absent. The authors conclude templates and imagery are closely linked.
Reeder · Vision Research
This review argues that conflicting results on how far images held in mind overlap with seeing, in the brain and in behavior, may largely come from differences between people: how vivid and precise their imagery is, the strategy they use, the size of their visual cortex, and their expertise with a class of objects. It notes that several studies linking vividness to brain activity tested only 8 to 11 people and cannot alone be taken as strong evidence. It urges researchers to measure these differences, ideally pairing questionnaires with objective tasks.
Pearson and Westbrook · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Researchers propose a dichotomous framework for phantom perception, distinguishing between voluntary mental imagery and involuntary experiences like illusions or synesthesia. This classification helps unify diverse sensory phenomena and provides a roadmap for studying the neural mechanisms of constructive perception.
Cui and colleagues · Vision Research
In eight adults, those who rated their visual imagery as more vivid showed more activity in early visual cortex, relative to the rest of the brain, while imagining people exercising in a brain scanner. They were also worse at identifying a briefly flashed color word when the background matched the color the word named. The authors propose both as objective measures of how vivid someone's imagery is, though the links come from only eight people.