Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Want to take part? See the studies you can join.
Running a study? We can help you recruit participants.
Williams and Suggate · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
People with low imagery reported being less absorbed in stories, especially in seeing scenes and feeling transported, yet still enjoyed reading. This suggests imagery shapes how reading feels more than whether people like it.
Milton and colleagues · Cerebral Cortex Communications
People with aphantasia matched others on standard memory tests but recalled fewer details of past events and imagined scenes. The authors suggest weaker links between frontal control areas and visual areas may explain the missing imagery.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
Questionnaires from 2,000 people with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia linked aphantasia to science jobs and self-reported poor memory of past events, hyperphantasia to creative jobs. Imagery extremes appear tied to wider traits.
Palombo and colleagues · Cortex
The authors built a self-report questionnaire about everyday memory for one's own life, the Survey of Autobiographical Memory, and tested it with 598 healthy adults in Toronto. Answers grouped into general good-or-poor memory factors plus separate factors for finding one's way and for imagining the future; memory for events and memory for facts did not separate, though the authors kept them as separate scores. People reporting past depression rated their memory for events lower, men rated their sense of direction higher, and scores related modestly to some laboratory memory tests. Shorter 26-item and 10-item versions are offered.