People with aphantasia often encode and recall memories differently, without leaning on visual replay. This can mean real gaps, alongside strategies that work around them.
Kleider-Offutt and Meacham · Psychology, Crime & Law
In an online study of 323 students and volunteers, describing a perpetrator's face after a crime video went with slightly better lineup choices, not the worse choices older studies predicted. The 16 people with weak or no visual imagery picked as accurately as everyone else, and they did better after describing the face (46% against 33% correct), but with eight people in each condition this is a pattern to test again rather than a finding. The authors suggest people without imagery may lean on words to remember faces.
Cleary and colleagues · Neurocase
Researchers found that a 16-year-old with HSAM exhibited typical visual imagery vividness but significantly higher rates of involuntary memories. This suggests that superior memory may be driven by retrieval frequency rather than imagery ability.
Delhaye and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia remembered which color went with which shape as well as typical imagers, even for hard-to-name shapes. The authors conclude that neither imagery nor verbal labels is necessary for this kind of memory.
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.
Li and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In a phone navigation game, 63 people with aphantasia were slower than others on complex levels, with no clear gap on simple ones, and rated their own sense of direction lower. The authors suggest picturing a map helps most when there is a lot to remember.
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.
Duckett and Simons · Neuropsychologia
In 60 adults, neither questionnaire imagery scores nor average vividness predicted memory for scenes, but memories rated more vivid than a person's own average were more often correct. Re-analyzed aphantasia data showed the same trial-level link.
Wantzen and Witt · L’Année psychologique
Aphantasics reported less frequent use of autobiographical memory for identity and directive purposes than controls. This suggests that a lack of mental imagery may alter how individuals utilize their personal past to guide future behavior and self-concept.
Bartolomeo and Arcangeli · Cortex
Researchers argue that congenital aphantasia is not "imagery blindsight" because individuals retain high-level accuracy and conscious access to information via non-visual routes. This suggests aphantasia involves a selective inability to format information into a quasi-visual experience.
Guillaume and Armand · L’Année psychologique
A 51-year-old man with lifelong aphantasia, who reported no visual or auditory imagery, was compared with seven matched men on two recognition tests. He recognized word and picture pairs as well as they did when the two items were related in meaning, but almost never when they were unrelated, calling nearly every unrelated pair new whether or not he had seen it. He also recognized fewer of the studied faces that showed fear. The authors suggest his memory works when it can lean on meaning and fails when it needs visual reconstruction, and caution that this is a single case.
Zeman and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Replying to a proposal that aphantasia reflects broken mental "rendering," this letter argues that conscious object imagery is unlikely to be a useless by-product. Links with memory, empathy and emotion suggest it may support social life.
Balaban and Ullman · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
This short letter replies to a proposal that visual imagery, which it treats as the mind's "graphical rendering", plays a central role in social life. It agrees imagery may matter socially but doubts a direct link. Instead it suggests an indirect one: pictures, seen or imagined, may stir old emotional systems that words cannot trigger, which could explain why people with aphantasia react less to written descriptions of distressing events. It still argues that rendering is probably not crucial and that much of imagination's work is done by simulating how things physically behave rather than by making pictures.
Monzel, Nagai and Silvanto · Scientific Reports
People with aphantasia report significantly lower interceptive awareness and emotional engagement with bodily signals. This suggests that mental imagery plays a key role in linking internal bodily states to the recall of personal memories.
Hayes, Miles and Evans · New Ideas in Psychology
Five people with aphantasia described leaning on facts, a soundless inner voice, and notes, photos and other people to remember. The authors suggest these strategies help but only partly offset real memory difficulties.
Pounder and colleagues · Cogent Psychology
Six women living in the UK who could not form images at will were interviewed about life with aphantasia. Difficulties with recalling faces, reliving personal memories and finding their way came up most, though each woman described a different mix. All six reported images in dreams, some only rarely; several had sudden images at times of intense emotion or deep relaxation, and some felt their images were there but out of reach. All six said they could not imagine smells or tastes.
McCormick and Lange · Frontiers in Cognition
This short review compares memory for personal events in aphantasia and in blindness. People with aphantasia recall fewer details of every kind and relive memories less, while the few small studies of blind people suggest their memories feel about as vivid as sighted people's, though they often need more prompting. The authors propose that building a mental scene matters more for vivid memory than having seen the world, and note that no study has yet tested scene building in people born blind.
Pauly-Takacs and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia recalled and recognized word lists as well as others and were just as prone to false memories. This suggests aphantasia neither weakens verbal memory nor protects against verbal false memories.
Thorudottir, Asgeirsson and Sigurdardottir
In this preprint, which had not been peer reviewed, 55 adults in Iceland tried to reproduce the exact colors of everyday objects seen a moment earlier or earlier in a long series, and matched colors shown on screen. How vividly people said they could picture things did not predict how precisely they remembered colors. In interviews, most people, whatever their imagery, said they named the colors to themselves in the short memory task, and in the longer task those who used words were more precise. Only nine participants had aphantasia, one of them with no imagery at all.
Li and colleagues · Memory
In an online study, 65 people with weak or no imagery and 72 typical imagers described a walking route they took at least weekly and one taken only once or twice in three years. For the familiar route, both groups gave similar numbers of spatial, object and sensory details. For the rarely traveled route, the group with weak or no imagery gave a smaller share of sensory details, nearly all about how things looked. The authors suggest repeated exposure lets people without imagery recall as much detail by other means, such as words and meaning.
Goldwasser · Philosophical Studies
Episodic remembering and active imagining are the same kind of agent-involving process of constructing and using imagery. This suggests that memory is a mental action subject to the same agential constraints and intentions as imagination.