VideosTalk on Friday 21 August 2026
Total Recall, No Pictures: Memory Without a Mind's Eye
Can you hold an object's shape and colour together in memory without a picture of it? Dr Emma Delhaye tested people with aphantasia, then made the shapes hard to name. They did as well as visualizers.
5 min read
Many people with aphantasia wonder whether their memory pays a price for the missing pictures. Dr Emma Delhaye, a memory researcher at the University of Lisbon, tested one part of that question: can you hold an object's features together in memory, its shape and its colour, without an image to hold them in?
She presented the study to members in a live talk with our founder, Tom Ebeyer, in August 2026. This page follows her talk. The paper is linked at the end.
Objects are made of features
When you look at a red mug, your brain takes in its shape, its colour, its texture and where it sits, and fuses them into one thing. Researchers call this feature integration. Delhaye studies the step after it: how that fused object is kept in memory, for a few seconds or for years. She calls it a conjunctive representation, one unit rather than a list of parts.
Her example in the talk is the Big Dipper. You could store its seven stars as seven points and the distances between them, which takes effort. If you know the shape, you store it as one thing and recognize it at a glance. Words work the same way. You read "sunflower" as one thing, not as a sun and a flower.
Two ways memory is thought to cope
Memory research knows two strategies that help people hold things in mind. One is a mental image. The other is a verbal label: naming what you see, under your breath.
Earlier work found that people with aphantasia lean on strategies that are not visual and match typical imagers on working memory tasks. When Wilma Bainbridge asked people to draw a room from memory, those with aphantasia drew fewer objects and used more written labels.
So Delhaye's team asked two questions. Do you need a conscious image to bind a shape to its colour? And do you need to be able to name what you are holding?
The study
Seventy-eight adults took part online, from home: 29 with aphantasia and 49 typical imagers. Everyone in the aphantasia group scored 23 or below on a standard imagery questionnaire marked out of 80, where 16 is the lowest possible score. The typical imagers scored 40 or above.
On each trial, four coloured shapes appeared for four seconds. A second later the shapes and colours came back apart, with one extra of each, and people dragged each colour onto the shape it had belonged to. Half the shapes were easy to name, such as a square or a circle. The rest were abstract and hard to name in four seconds, which made the verbal strategy much harder to use.
The team added two more measures. In some blocks people were asked to rebuild what they had seen; in others, to build any pairing except the ones they had seen. Comparing the two lets researchers estimate how much of a memory comes back on its own and how much takes deliberate effort. After each trial, people also rated their confidence from one to five.
Delhaye thanked the participants at the end of her talk. Many found the task hard work and kept going to the end.
What they found
The two groups did not differ. People with aphantasia rebuilt the pairings as accurately as typical imagers did, showed the same balance of automatic and deliberate memory, and felt as confident.
Shapes that were hard to name made the task harder for everyone: fewer correct pairings and lower confidence in both groups. Even then, the aphantasia group scored well above chance, which was 16%.
Delhaye said she had expected naming to be the main strategy in aphantasia, so that making it hard would hit that group hardest. It did not. In the paper, the authors write that the lack of any group difference came as a surprise.
What it means
For people with aphantasia, the finding is plain. Holding an object's features together in short-term memory does not need a mental picture. Delhaye added that newer work by her doctoral student, not yet published, again finds no difference in memory accuracy, in line with many earlier studies.
For memory science, the authors draw a wider conclusion. If people bind features with no image and with little help from words, the first step of binding may happen automatically, before any strategy comes into play. This is their interpretation, and researchers disagree about it. The study cannot rule out other routes. People with aphantasia may have used spatial or movement-based strategies, or visual information in the brain that never reaches awareness.
What members asked
The full talk runs 56 minutes, and nearly half of it is conversation. Members and Tom asked Delhaye:
- Whether the image is the memory, or a picture laid over it. She described imagining as perception run in reverse, from meaning out toward the senses.
- Why naming the shapes gave only a small lift.
- Whether animals, which have no language, bind features the same way. Much of this research began in monkeys and rodents.
- How short-term and long-term memory differ, and a theory that cares more about what is stored than about which system stores it.
- Whether coping without images costs more effort, and how aphantasia might affect learning a language.
- Whether aphantasia changes how traumatic memories are held, and why object memory may be the link to study.
Members can watch the full talk, questions included, on this page.
The paper
Delhaye, E., Fritz, P., Martial, C., & Bastin, C. (2026). The role of visual imagery and verbal coding in short-term memory conjunctive binding: evidence from aphantasia. Consciousness and Cognition, 141, 104036. Read our summary in the research library.
Sources
Topics
Written by
- ANAphantasia Network
Aphantasia Network is shaping a new, global conversation on the power of image-free thinking. We’re creating a place to discover and learn about aphantasia. Our mission is to help build a bridge between new scientific discoveries and our unique human experience — to uncover new insight into how we learn, create, dream, remember and more with blind imagination.
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