ArticleeLife2022
The pupillary light response as a physiological index of aphantasia, sensory and phenomenological imagery strength.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- "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
- Article
- 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
- Pupil Size Reflects Trial-Level Variability in Imagery Vividness During Immersive Storytelling but Not (or Hardly) Individual Differences in Trait Imagery.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Vividness of mental imagery reflects a broad range of internally generated visual experiences.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Mental imagery modulates bistable perception in a modality-specific manner.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A visual imagery paradigm for BCI strategies using imagined flickering patterns.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- AI-guided digital intervention with physiological monitoring reduces intrusive memories after experimental trauma.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Eye metrics often reflect visual conscious awareness, conscious content, and neural processing in cerebral blindness.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Do you see what I see? Linking involuntary nonretinal (phantom) vision and mental imagery in aphantasia.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Task evoked EEG reveals neural processing differences in aphantasia.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Motor imagery in individuals with congenital aphantasia.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Why indecisive trials matter: Improving the binocular rivalry imagery priming score for the assessment of aphantasia.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Sleuthing subjectivity: a review of covert measures of consciousness.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Seeing Is Feeling: How Aphantasia Alters Emotional Engagement With Stories.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Missing images: autobiographical memory in Aphantasia and blindness.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Review
- Living and learning with a blind mind's eye: college students with aphantasia.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Pupil adjustments to illusory perceptions of the light intensity of object surfaces.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The pupillary light response is an important automatic physiological response which optimizes light reaching the retina. Recent work has shown that the pupil also adjusts in response to illusory brightness and a range of cognitive functions, however, it remains unclear what exactly drives these endogenous changes. Here, we show that the imagery pupillary light response correlates with objective measures of sensory imagery strength. Further, the trial-by-trial phenomenological vividness of visual imagery is tracked by the imagery pupillary light response. We also demonstrated that a group of individuals without visual imagery (aphantasia) do not show any significant evidence of an imagery pupillary light response, however they do show perceptual pupil light responses and pupil dilation with larger cognitive load. Our results provide evidence that the pupillary light response indexes the sensory strength of visual imagery. This work also provides the first physiological validation of aphantasia.
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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.