Aphantasia

Interest in the phenomenon renewed after the publication of a study in 2015 conducted by a team led by Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter.

[2]In 1897, Théodule-Armand Ribot reported a kind of "typographic visual type" imagination, consisting in mentally seeing ideas in the form of corresponding printed words.

[12]The phenomenon remained largely unstudied until 2005, when Professor Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter was approached by a man who seemed to have lost the ability to visualize after undergoing minor surgery.

[13] Following the publication of this patient's case in 2010,[14] a number of people approached Zeman reporting a lifelong inability to visualize.

In 2015, Zeman's team published a paper on what they termed "congenital aphantasia",[3] sparking renewed interest in the phenomenon.

[15] Zeman's 2015 paper used the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), developed by David Marks in 1973, to evaluate the quality of the mental image of 21 self-diagnosed and self-selected participants.

It found no significant differences in visual working memory task performances for those with aphantasia when compared to controls.

To explore this, a follow-up experiment by the same researchers found people without aphantasia saw a greater reduction in reaction time when selecting the target from two images compared to from two words.

[24] A 2023 study explored more natural scenarios and found that aphantasics are slower at solving hidden object pictures.

[32] A subsequent study, corroborated this finding, showing that the majority of a sample of people recruited on the basis of visual aphantasia also reported having reduced auditory imagery.

[33] A 2022 study estimated the prevalence of aphantasia among the general population by screening undergraduate students and people from an online crowdsourcing marketplace through the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire.

[36] There have been various approaches to find a general theory of aphantasia or incorporate it into current philosophical, psychological and linguistic research.

[43] In addition, the research of Keogh and Pearson's[44] follow-up with over 50 participants further confirmed the absence of sensory imagery in aphantasia, adding evidence to the field of study.