The conceptual groundwork: what aphantasia actually is, how it's been defined, and where those definitions still get debated.
Silvanto · Frontiers in Psychology
Aphantasia may stem from reduced interceptive precision in the insula, which disrupts the sense of agency and embodiment needed for mental imagery. This suggests that imagery relies on the integration of internal bodily states and top-down predictions.
Phillips · Noûs
Aphantasia is characterized by a specific lack of visual-object imagery while spatial imagery remains preserved. This distinction explains why individuals can perform well on spatial tasks despite reporting a complete absence of a mind's eye.
Liu and colleagues · Cortex
In a 7-tesla brain imaging study of 10 people with aphantasia and 10 typical imagers, attempted imagery activated similar visual areas in both groups. In aphantasia, a key imagery region was less connected with frontal and parietal areas.
Silvanto and Nagai · Brain Topography
Researchers propose that mental imagery requires the integration of sensory information with internal physiological signals via the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. This suggests aphantasia may stem from a failure to ground sensory simulations in bodily experience.
Purkart and colleagues · Cognition
People with aphantasia did not show priming effects in tasks requiring mental imagery, unlike typical imagers. This provides objective behavioral evidence that aphantasia involves a genuine lack of both conscious and unconscious mental imagery.
Chang and colleagues · Current Biology
Researchers found that stimulus-specific information can be decoded from the early visual cortex of people with aphantasia during imagery attempts. This suggests that aphantasia involves a representational break between neural activity and conscious experience.
Arnold and colleagues · Cortex
Among university students, those who rated their imagery as less vivid were less likely to picture something, like a pink elephant, when told not to. This suggests weaker imagery may bring more resistance to unwanted images.
Krempel · Erkenntnis
A philosophy paper argues that wordless, imageless "unsymbolized" thoughts and total aphantasia challenge the view that conscious thought needs mental images. It concludes they are evidence that conscious thoughts can occur without imagery.
Michel and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Aphantasia may involve nonconscious imagistic representations that lack phenomenal awareness, similar to blindsight. This suggests the condition is primarily a deficit of conscious access rather than a total absence of mental imagery.
Argueta and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
A review of 52 aphantasia studies concludes it is a visual deficit, not a mental disorder. Memory was the most studied topic, but most memory evidence was self-reported and some objective tests found no difference.
Monzel, Karneboge and Reuter · Biomarkers in Neuropsychiatry
Aphantasia is linked to reduced physiological and self-reported sympathy for verbal scenarios and slower emotion recognition in others. This suggests mental imagery is a key mechanism for amplifying emotional and empathic responses.
Montabes de la Cruz and colleagues · Current Biology
Aphantasic individuals show reduced decoding of auditory information in the early visual cortex compared to sighted and blind controls. This suggests that aphantasia involves a broader impairment of top-down feedback to visual brain areas.
Cabbai and colleagues · Current Biology
In an fMRI study, the type of sound people with aphantasia heard could be decoded from their primary visual cortex, though they reported no imagery. A higher region, the precuneus, tracked whether imagery was experienced.
Milton · Current Biology
Aphantasia is linked to disrupted sensory representations in the primary visual cortex during voluntary imagery. This suggests that impaired feedback from higher-level brain regions to the visual cortex may cause the absence of a mental eye.
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.
Bouyer and Arnold · Frontiers in Psychology
Deep aphantasia may involve atypical sensory experiences where perception is minimally shaped by prior expectations or feedback. This suggests some forms of aphantasia impact both voluntary imagery and the processing of actual visual inputs.
Pounder and colleagues · PLOS ONE
People with aphantasia performed as well as typical imagers on auditory tasks despite reporting a lack of inner sound. This indicates a significant discrepancy between subjective imagery experience and objective behavioral performance.
Krempel and Monzel · Consciousness and Cognition
In a new experiment, people with aphantasia rated afterimages as fainter than typical imagers did. Together with a review of other studies, this suggests aphantasia affects images that arise on their own, not only ones made on purpose.
Keogh and Pearson · Neuroscience Research
Individuals with aphantasia showed no evidence of sensory visual imagery when tested with an objective binocular rivalry paradigm. This confirms that aphantasia is a genuine lack of sensory imagery rather than just a difference in metacognitive reporting.
Esselaar and colleagues · Brain Communications
Individuals with aphantasia do not show increased corticospinal excitability during motor imagery or action observation. This suggests that aphantasia may involve a neurophysiological inability to simulate actions rather than a metacognitive deficit.