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.
Reeder and colleagues · Cognition
Aphantasics performed as well as typical imagers on a precise visual working memory task by using non-visual spatial and sensorimotor strategies. This demonstrates that mental imagery is not required for maintaining high-fidelity visual information.
Monzel and colleagues · eLife
People with aphantasia recalled fewer event, emotion and sensory details from their own lives than controls. During recall their hippocampus was less active, their visual cortex more active, and the two lacked the coupling seen in controls.
Siena and Simons · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
People with aphantasia rated their memories as less vivid but recalled object colors and locations as accurately as others. The authors suggest some may lack awareness of their imagery rather than the imagery itself.
Monzel, Handlogten and Reuter · Cognition
People with aphantasia do not experience the verbal overshadowing effect, which typically impairs face recognition after verbal description. This suggests that visual mental imagery is a necessary component for this memory interference to occur.
Dando and colleagues · Royal Society Open Science
Eyewitnesses with aphantasia recalled fewer correct details of a filmed crime than typical imagers but made no more errors. They recalled least when asked to picture the scene, which suggests imagery-based interviews may not suit them.
Bergmann and Ortiz-Tudela · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Researchers propose that aphantasia stems from specific deficits in high-level feedback signals along the visual "what" stream during memory retrieval. This suggests that memory impairments in aphantasia are tied to the inability to reinstate precise object features rather than a general episodic memory failure.
Beran and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Of 5,010 U.S. adults, 8.9% said they had no mental imagery, but only 1.5% scored in the aphantasia range on a standard questionnaire. This suggests estimates of how common aphantasia is depend on how it is measured.
Wittmann and Şatırer · Learning & Memory
People with aphantasia remembered which items went together as accurately as others but were less often highly confident. This suggests imagery contributes to memory confidence rather than accuracy.
Dawes and colleagues · Cognition
People with aphantasia described past and imagined future events with fewer event-specific details, mainly visual ones, especially for the future. This suggests visual imagery helps people rebuild events in rich detail.
Monzel, Vetterlein and Reuter · Journal of Neuropsychology
In an online study, 67 people with aphantasia and 32 people with more imagery, grouped by an imagery questionnaire, did four timed memory tasks: recalling spoken words, redrawing seven lines they had just seen, recognizing the earlier words in a longer list, and picking out and completing complex shapes seen earlier. The aphantasia group scored lower on average, by a small to moderate margin, and the gap did not differ reliably between tasks. The authors suggest imagery supports memory even for words, but the study was not preregistered and they note that missing imagery may not be the direct cause.
Keogh, Wicken and Pearson · Cortex
People with aphantasia remembered visual patterns as well as people with imagery, but reported non-visual strategies such as labeling. This suggests imagery is only one of several tools people can use to hold visual information in mind.
Bainbridge and colleagues · Cortex
People with aphantasia drew fewer objects and less color from memory than typical imagers, but placed objects just as accurately and added fewer false ones. This suggests memory for objects and memory for locations rely on separate systems.
Dawes and colleagues · Scientific Reports
People with aphantasia reported weaker imagery in all senses, less vivid memories and imagined futures, and fewer dreams, but similar spatial skills. This suggests imagery is a common tool that many mental processes draw on.
Brons · Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science
Aphantasics and those with SDAM retain personal and affective memories despite lacking the ability to re-experience the past through mental imagery. This suggests episodic memory is a composite of independent modules rather than a single unified faculty.
Watkins · Cortex
A physicist who lacks both visual imagery and the ability to relive his past describes how he discovered these differences. He suggests the two are linked but not identical, since not everyone with aphantasia has memory problems.
Jacobs, Schwarzkopf and Silvanto · Cortex
A woman with lifelong aphantasia was compared with 11 women with typical imagery on memory tests. She was as accurate as them on a task meant to need imagery, judging whether a dot fell inside a shape that was named but not shown, though she was worse than IQ-matched controls at telling her right answers from her wrong ones. She did worse only on the hardest trials of a matching visual memory task. The authors suggest she uses other strategies that work in most conditions but lose out when fine visual detail is needed; this is a single case.
Palombo, Sheldon and Levine · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Autobiographical memory varies significantly across individuals, ranging from highly superior to severely deficient capacities. This suggests that memory is a trait-like profile driven by distinct neural connectivity and cognitive strategies.
Sheldon, Amaral and Levine · Memory
Thirty-five young adults watched short everyday video clips and then answered true or false questions while looking either at flickering visual noise, which disrupts imagery, or at a plain gray screen. The noise made no difference overall, but the higher people rated their spatial imagery, the more accuracy they lost under noise on questions about what happened and where, though not about object details; object imagery ratings did not predict this loss. The authors suggest strong spatial imagers lean on imagery to rebuild events, while weaker spatial imagers may rely on other routes, such as verbal knowledge.
Palombo and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Three healthy adults who cannot relive past events scored normally on most memory tests but poorly when recalling visual details. The authors suggest the problem lies in handling visual information within memory for one's own life.
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.