Spatial imagery is locating and moving objects in mental space, distinct from picturing what they look like. People with aphantasia often score well here.
Takamura and colleagues · Cortex
Aphantasic individuals showed eye movement patterns similar to visualizers when exploring mental maps despite reporting no subjective imagery. This suggests aphantasia may reflect reduced metacognitive access to imagery rather than a total absence of representational content.
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.
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.
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.
Delem and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that individuals with aphantasia scored lower across all sensory imagery modalities but performed similarly to controls on spatial and cognitive tasks. This suggests that multisensory imagery deficits do not hinder general cognitive or spatial reasoning abilities.
Nanay · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Aphantasia is a heterogeneous condition with distinct subtypes, including variations in voluntary control and sensory modalities. Recognizing these differences is essential for developing accurate experimental methodologies and explanations.
Balaban and Ullman · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Researchers propose that the mind separates physical simulation from graphical rendering, much like a game engine. This suggests aphantasia may be a case of "broken rendering" where underlying spatial and physical representations remain intact.
Zeman · Neuropsychologia
Ten years after aphantasia was named, Adam Zeman argues it likely has several subtypes and that most abilities are spared, with memory for one's own past differing most. He urges an open mind in this young field.
Monzel and colleagues · Behavior Research Methods
Using existing data from 111 people, 38 classed as having little or no imagery, the authors propose a new way to score a test in which imagining a colored pattern makes it more likely to be seen when each eye sees a different pattern. Counting trials where people saw a mix, instead of dropping them, made the score agree better with self-reported imagery, but only when few clear trials were recorded. The score explained about a tenth of the variation in self-reports, and the authors judge it better at separating groups than individuals and too weak to classify one person.
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.
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.
Kay, Keogh and Pearson · Consciousness and Cognition
People with aphantasia were slower but more accurate than controls on mental rotation tasks, favoring analytic strategies over visual ones. This suggests that aphantasics use non-visual cognitive methods to solve complex spatial problems.
Palermo and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In an online survey of 490 Italian adults, about 3% scored very low on a questionnaire's object imagery scale (pictures of things) and 3.5% on its spatial scale (layouts and rotation), with smaller groups at the high end. The low object group reported weak or missing images of faces, objects and events, yet still reported dream images; the low spatial group reported trouble mainly with mental rotation. Both low groups reported a poorer sense of direction, but neither differed reliably from controls on everyday memory or face recognition. Nearly all measures were self-report.
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.