ArticleBrain sciences2020
The Architect Who Lost the Ability to Imagine: The Cerebral Basis of Visual Imagery.
Article in Brain sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Right hemisphere involvement in intensive aphasia therapy outcomes: a multimodal neuroimaging concept study.Journal of neurology · 2026Article
- A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Neuroradiological Insights into Visual Mental Imagery: Structural and Functional Imaging of Ventral and Dorsal Streams.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Stronger Short-Term Memory, Larger Hippocampi and Area V1 in People with High VVIQ Scores.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Visual imagery of familiar people and places in category selective cortex.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Subregions of the fusiform gyrus are differentially involved in the attentional mechanism supporting visual mental imagery in depression.Brain imaging and behavior · 2024Article
- A Systematic Review of Aphantasia: Concept, Measurement, Neural Basis, and Theory Development.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Creative connections: the neural correlates of semantic relatedness are associated with creativity.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Working memory signals in early visual cortex are present in weak and strong imagers.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Strategies, debates, and adversarial collaboration in working memory: The 51st Bartlett Lecture.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Article
- Preferential signal pathways during the perception and imagery of familiar scenes: An effective connectivity study.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Vividness of visual imagery questionnaire scores and their relationship to visual short-term memory performance.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2022Article
- I cannot picture it in my mind: acquired aphantasia after autologous stem cell transplantation for multiple myeloma.Oxford medical case reports · 2021Article
- Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2021Article
- Reply to: Assessing the causal role of early visual areas in visual mental imagery.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Vividness, Consciousness and Mental Imagery: A Start on Connecting the Dots.Brain sciences · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
While the loss of mental imagery following brain lesions was first described more than a century ago, the key cerebral areas involved remain elusive. Here we report neuropsychological data from an architect (PL518) who lost his ability for visual imagery following a bilateral posterior cerebral artery (PCA) stroke. We compare his profile to three other patients with bilateral PCA stroke and another architect with a large PCA lesion confined to the right hemisphere. We also compare structural images of their lesions, aiming to delineate cerebral areas selectively lesioned in acquired aphantasia. When comparing the neuropsychological profile and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the aphantasic architect PL518 to patients with either a comparable background (an architect) or bilateral PCA lesions, we find: (1) there is a large overlap of cognitive deficits between patients, with the very notable exception of aphantasia which only occurs in PL518, and (2) there is large overlap of the patients' lesions. The only areas of selective lesion in PL518 is a small patch in the left fusiform gyrus as well as part of the right lingual gyrus. We suggest that these areas, and perhaps in particular the region in the left fusiform gyrus, play an important role in the cerebral network involved in visual imagery.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.