Tactile aphantasia is the inability to mentally recreate touch: texture, pressure, temperature. It can occur alone or alongside other missing senses.
Suggate, Milton and Tree · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia were more accurate but slower than controls on multimodal mental comparison tasks. This suggests that sensory cognition can be successfully achieved through propositional rather than imagistic strategies.
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.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
Researchers propose defining aphantasia as the absence or reduction of voluntary sensory imagery across any modality. This unified terminology avoids a proliferation of new terms while acknowledging that imagery deficits can be specific or multisensory.