ArticleCortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior2021
Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory.
Article in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 173 citations in OpenAlex.
- "The Giant Black Elephant with white Tusks stood in a field of Green Grass": Cognitive and brain mechanisms underlying aphantasia.Consciousness and cognition · 2025Pooled it
- Value-Driven Crossmodal Spatial Attention: The Role of Perceptual Load.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Windows to the goal: Pupillary working memory signatures prospectively adapt to task demands.iScience · 2026Article
- Mental image vividness and aphantasia judgements are fundamentally compromised by overlooked definition problems.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Neural Mechanisms of Bidirectional Visuo-Linguistic Transformation in Interactive Communication.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Neuroradiological Insights into Visual Mental Imagery: Structural and Functional Imaging of Ventral and Dorsal Streams.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Evaluation of a Visual Cognitive Style in Autism: A Cluster Analysis.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Article
- Drawings of THINGS: A large-scale drawing dataset of 1854 object concepts.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Vividness of visual imagery is associated with perceived clarity of recall but not with accuracy during exams.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- From dots to faces: individual differences in visual imagery capacity predict the content of Ganzflicker-induced hallucinations.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Aphantasia and motor imagery: a step further in understanding imagery and its role in motor cognition.Journal of neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Why indecisive trials matter: Improving the binocular rivalry imagery priming score for the assessment of aphantasia.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Characterizing internal models of the visual environment.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Stronger Short-Term Memory, Larger Hippocampi and Area V1 in People with High VVIQ Scores.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Seeing Is Feeling: How Aphantasia Alters Emotional Engagement With Stories.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- The neural underpinnings of aphantasia: a case study of identical twins.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- The Neural Underpinnings of Aphantasia: A Case Study of Identical Twins.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Visual free recall and recognition in art students and laypeople.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Congenital aphantasia is a recently characterized variation of experience defined by the inability to form voluntary visual imagery, in individuals who are otherwise high performing. Because of this specific deficit to visual imagery, individuals with aphantasia serve as an ideal group for probing the nature of representations in visual memory, particularly the interplay of object, spatial, and symbolic information. Here, we conducted a large-scale online study of aphantasia and revealed a dissociation in object and spatial content in their memory representations. Sixty-one individuals with aphantasia and matched controls with typical imagery studied real-world scene images, and were asked to draw them from memory, and then later copy them during a matched perceptual condition. Drawings were objectively quantified by 2,795 online scorers for object and spatial details. Aphantasic participants recalled significantly fewer objects than controls, with less color in their drawings, and an increased reliance on verbal scaffolding. However, aphantasic participants showed high spatial accuracy equivalent to controls, and made significantly fewer memory errors. These differences between groups only manifested during recall, with no differences between groups during the matched perceptual condition. This object-specific memory impairment in individuals with aphantasia provides evidence for separate systems in memory that support object versus spatial information. The study also provides an important experimental validation for the existence of aphantasia as a variation in human imagery experience.
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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.