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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Yan, Roberts and Bainbridge · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasic individuals showed a robust picture superiority effect and recalled symbols better than pictures. This challenges dual-coding theory by demonstrating that visual imagery is not essential for the memory advantages of image-based stimuli.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
People with aphantasia recalled fewer letters than others from a grid flashed for 50 milliseconds, but not from one shown for 5 seconds. This suggests imagery helps hold a split-second visual trace, while other strategies work given more time.
Nedergaard and Lupyan · Psychological Science
People reporting little inner speech (anendophasia) recalled fewer words and judged picture rhymes less accurately, with no difference in task switching. The gaps vanished among those who said they talked out loud.
Lupyan and colleagues · Cognitive Science
People vary widely in their hidden internal experiences, often assuming their own subjective reality is universal. Studying these phenomenal differences helps researchers identify non-visual cognitive strategies and test the limits of universal psychological theories.
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.