Probing the unimaginable: The impact of aphantasia on distinct domains of visual mental imagery and visual perception.
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior September 1, 2023 Jianghao Liu, Paolo Bartolomeo 68 citations
People with aphantasia, who report absent or nearly absent visual imagery, perform as accurately as typical and unusually vivid imagers on tasks involving object shape, color, written words, faces, and spatial relationships. However, they respond more slowly on both imagery and perceptual tasks, and they report lower confidence in their perceptual judgments. Across all participants, higher vividness of imagery correlates with faster response times. The findings suggest that congenital aphantasia involves slower visual information processing in both imagery and perception, but the precision of that processing is unaffected. This pattern supports the idea that aphantasia may stem from a deficit in phenomenal consciousness or the use of alternative non-visual strategies.