The conceptual groundwork: what aphantasia actually is, how it's been defined, and where those definitions still get debated.
Nanay · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Researchers found that some individuals with aphantasia perform as well as controls on mental imagery tasks despite lacking conscious awareness. This suggests that aphantasia may involve unconscious mental imagery rather than a total absence of it.
Pearson · Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Aphantasics score significantly lower on objective sensory measures of imagery, confirming their lack of experience is not just a reporting issue. This suggests aphantasia involves a genuine deficit in the brain's sensory imagery strength.
Keogh and Pearson · Cortex
People with aphantasia showed almost no sign of imagery on an objective vision test, yet rated their spatial imagery as high as a comparison group did. This suggests aphantasia reflects a lack of sensory imagery rather than poor self-insight.
MacKisack and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
The paper traces the long philosophical history of mental imagery, from Aristotelian "phantasma" to behaviorist skepticism. This historical context reveals that modern neuroscientific debates over imagery's role in cognition are rooted in centuries of conflicting intellectual traditions.
de Vito and Bartolomeo · Cortex
Researchers suggest that aphantasia can have psychogenic origins linked to conditions like anxiety and depersonalization. This indicates that clinical evaluations of imagery loss should include psychopathological examinations.
Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala · Cortex
Of 21 people with lifelong weak or absent voluntary imagery, most still had involuntary images, as brief flashes or in dreams. The authors named this aphantasia and suspect it is a variation in brain function, akin to synesthesia.
Zeman and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
A man who suddenly lost his visual imagery still passed imagery and visual memory tests, but his brain worked differently when he tried to picture faces. This suggests imagery tasks can be done without the experience of seeing.
Faw · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Researchers distinguished between objective imagery performance and subjective conscious experience. This explains how non-imagers can successfully process visual information despite lacking a mind's eye.