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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Wang and colleagues · Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Posters
A VR system using guided imagery and spatial tasks significantly improved imagery clarity and recall in people with imagery deficits. This suggests that leveraging preserved spatial cognition can help rebuild visual imagery pathways.
Cui, Kong and Zhang · Frontiers in Psychology
Aphantasic participants showed muted neural responses and minimal autonomic changes during romantic imagery compared to those with vivid imagery. This suggests that mental imagery is a crucial driver of physiological and emotional arousal.
Lam and colleagues · Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
In 72 Hong Kong adults with high social anxiety, five days of online training in reading ambiguous social situations as harmless rather than threatening reduced negative interpretations more than a neutral reading task. People who rated their imagery as more vivid, especially for imagined feelings, body sensations, touch and smell, gained the most, while visual imagery made no clear difference. The training did not lower social anxiety more than the control task, though in the training group, people with more vivid imagery overall reported larger drops in anxiety about social interaction.
Chang and colleagues · Current Biology
Researchers found that stimulus-specific information can be decoded from the early visual cortex of people with aphantasia during imagery attempts. This suggests that aphantasia involves a representational break between neural activity and conscious experience.