The conceptual groundwork: what aphantasia actually is, how it's been defined, and where those definitions still get debated.
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.
Wright and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia rated feeling a movement in the mind as hard but easier than seeing it, especially right after doing the movement. This suggests kinesthetic imagery may exist without visual imagery, though weakly.
Loo and Buchsbaum · Consciousness and Cognition
Aphantasic individuals showed a greater accuracy drop than controls when backward masking disrupted visual pattern completion. This suggests that aphantasia involves weakened recurrent neural processing that affects both imagery and perception.
Tooming and Jakapi · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasia reveals that abstract thought does not require the capacity to manipulate mental images. This suggests that higher-level cognition can function independently of imagistic processes.
Knight, Milton and Zeman · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasics showed normal visual working memory performance and decodable neural representations in the visual cortex. This suggests aphantasia is a lack of conscious awareness rather than an inability to generate or store visual information.
Bartolomeo · Annual Review of Vision Science
Congenital aphantasia likely stems from impaired access to intact visual representations rather than a total lack of mental content. This suggests conscious visualization is an emergent property of large-scale network coordination.
Moskoff · University of Colorado Honors Journal
People with aphantasia responded faster than controls on language tasks, with neither group showing expected switching costs. This suggests that mental imagery is not required for language comprehension and may even slow processing.
Le Clézio and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasics did not show a visual impedance effect during reasoning, unlike typical imagers who were slowed by irrelevant visual details. This suggests that mental imagery can sometimes hinder cognitive performance by creating interference.
Cavalli and Plancher · L’Année psychologique
Introducing a special issue, the editors call aphantasia multifaceted, with memory differences in some areas and preserved abilities in others. They suggest it invites cognitive science to build individual differences into models of the mind.
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.
Speed, Mak and McRae · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia showed a match effect for object color during sentence comprehension, indicating they engage in unconscious mental simulation. This suggests that conscious imagery and involuntary simulation are separate cognitive processes.
Lorenzatti · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasics show significant behavioral and physiological differences from controls, including a lack of binocular rivalry priming and pupillary adjustments. These findings suggest aphantasia stems from an objective absence of sensory representations rather than a mere failure of introspection.
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.
Liu · Neuropsychologia
A theory paper proposes that conscious imagery passes through three attention-driven stages: generation, integration and amplification. In this still-untested model, aphantasia spares generation but impairs integration and amplification.
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
Researchers propose that visual imagery links to social reasoning and autobiographical memory indirectly through emotional activation. This suggests that "graphical rendering" in the mind serves as a vital building block for emotional and social processing.
Noble and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In brain scans of 58 people, more vivid imagery was weakly linked to more complex activity in the lower temporal lobes, and not only while imagining. The authors speculate that excess neural noise may underlie aphantasia.
Peruski · Journal of Neurophysiology
Aphantasics showed reduced right-brain activation and increased left middle frontal gyrus activity during motor imagery. This suggests they use compensatory semantic strategies, indicating mental imagery is not essential for motor cognition.
Hangai · Rhizomata
Alexander of Aphrodisias defines phantasia as a physiological process where residues from past perceptions trigger involuntary mental pictures of absent objects. This suggests that mental imagery is rooted in physical changes rather than direct sensory input.
Keogh and colleagues · Journal of Vision
Individuals with aphantasia reported experiencing the neon color spreading illusion less intensely than those with visual imagery. This suggests that visual imagery and the neon color illusion may share overlapping neural feedback mechanisms.