How do you measure something you can't see? Tools like the PSIQ and other imagery questionnaires let researchers quantify vividness and study it at scale.

Since 2015, "aphantasia" has reshaped our understanding of imagination, revealing that not everyone visualizes mentally. This discovery, along with "hyperphantasia," highlights the diverse nature of human imagination.
Tom Ebeyer · May 2024

New research from the University of Bonn reveals how aphantasia affects memory, particularly when remembering the past. The study of 30 participants found that people with aphantasia experience significant challenges in recalling autobiographical memories.
Tom Ebeyer · March 2024

This apple illusion allows people who can't visualize to temporarily 'see' an image that isn't there—using visual perception to demonstrate what others experience through their imagination.
Aphantasia Network · October 2023

February 2024
Punton and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Across two Edinburgh book festivals and an online sample (about 870 readers in all), researchers built a short questionnaire on how people imagine while reading. It picked out four strands: seeing scenes and spaces, the voice and wording of the text, modeling characters, and the reader's point of view, though the last was weakly measured. The scenes-and-spaces strand tracked vivid visual imagery most closely, and both it and character modeling went with feeling absorbed in stories. The study did not look at people with aphantasia separately.
Baade and colleagues · Chemistry Education Research and Practice
Students who reported more vivid spatial imagery answered more stereochemistry questions correctly, while visual imagery vividness showed no such link. This suggests visual vividness alone does not capture the imagery these tasks draw on.
Monzel, Reuter and Schultz · L’Année psychologique
Aphantasic participants leaned more than controls toward calling a moving dot not alive, with no clear difference in how fast they gathered evidence. Slower responses in aphantasia may reflect a starting lean rather than slower processing.
Vanbuckhave and colleagues · L’Année psychologique
Among 50 typical imagers, pupils showed no clear difference when imagining dark versus bright triangles, and only 56% showed the expected pattern. Pupil size may not be a reliable objective test for aphantasia.
How do we define "mental image" in visualization, and how does personal interpretation affect generated images?
Victor · · 1 reply
Marketing often targets neurotypicals, leaving others feeling misled. How can we create strategies that resonate with diverse cognitive experiences?
Josh · · 2 replies
A self-report measure of attention towards internal bodily sensations.
Understanding your beliefs about how accurately you perceive your body's signals.