Abstract

Invited speakers' abstracts (in order of appearance)

Sergio Della Sala (University of Edinburgh) “Aphantasia: A Decade of Fog Self-Report, Reification, and the Limits of a Category”

We introduced the term aphantasia in 2015. Naming a condition attracts a community that develops shared ways of describing and interpreting its experiences, creating a circularity: the self-report data on which the field depends are collected from populations already shaped by the construct those data are intended to validate. A decade on, three interlocking problems have emerged: (i) the measurement problem: aphantasia research rests overwhelmingly on introspective self-report; (ii) the construct problem: the field has largely inherited a binary category from its own origin story; (iii) the heterogeneity and replication problem: modest effect sizes, high between-study variance, and partial neglect of the hyperphantasic end of the distribution. The more we have looked, the less certain we can be about what we are looking at, and that sitting with that uncertainty, rather than papering over it, is where the field needs to go next.

Bence Nanay (University of Antwerp) “Even wider varieties of aphantasia”

The aim of this talk is to argue that instead of focusing on the contrast between aphantasics and non-aphantasics or the contrast between hyperphantasics and non-hyperphantasics (or the threefold contrast between aphantasics, hyperphantasics and the rest), we should consider the entirety of the imagery vividness spectrum. The reason for this is that the vividness of mental imagery makes a significant difference in a variety of mental phenomena, including desires and cravings, creativity, productivity, procrastination, learning, memory, reading, music appreciation, mental health and more. These considerations apply not only for the differences between aphantasics and non-aphantasics, but for everyone, regardless of where they are on the aphantasia-hyperphantasia spectrum.

Jianghao Liu (Paris Brain Institute) “Neural mechanism of aphantasia: representation and access of imagery”

Around 4% of people report congenital aphantasia: they cannot voluntarily visualize objects, yet they can describe their visual appearance accurately. What neural mechanisms produce this dissociation between subjective experience and objective performance? Aphantasia offers a unique window onto the mechanisms that make internally generated representations conscious. In this talk, I will present results from ultra-high-field 7T fMRI, diffusion tractography and eye-tracking that characterize the behavior and neural circuits underlying visual mental imagery and perception, in typical imagers and in individuals with congenital aphantasia. Building on these findings, I will propose a three-stage GIA model of how internally generated representations give rise to conscious imagery experience.

Andrea Blomkvist (University of Glasgow) “Is aphantasia a natural kind?”

Philosophers and scientists both worry about whether we are accurately carving nature at its joints. Despite this, there has been little systematic investigation into whether we have carved nature at its joints when demarcating what we call “aphantasia”. In this talk, I will explore whether aphantasia can be construed as a natural kind, and if so, what benefits this could provide as guidance for our continued research. I will take my cue from the philosophy of psychiatry, where there is a long-standing debate about whether mental disorders are natural kinds, which I will argue is fruitful for our thinking about the case of aphantasia. I will attempt to sketch aphantasia both as a natural kind in the essentialist tradition, as well as a natural kind according to the mechanistic property cluster view, and find in favour of the latter. Drawing on current neuroscientific theories of aphantasia as well as behavioural findings, I will show that we can establish a property cluster typically exhibited in aphantasia, as well as plausible causal neural mechanisms. Finally, I conclude that this analysis can shed light on definitional and practical issues which aphantasia researchers currently face.

Ian Phillips (Johns Hopkins University) “Explaining the puzzle of aphantasia: Spatial imagery, not unconscious visualization”

How do individuals who report little or no visual imagery perform more or less normally on tasks presumed to draw on it? This puzzle of aphantasia exemplifies a broader conundrum in imagery research, namely the weak correlation between subjective reports and cognitive-task performance. A popular explanation is that individuals differ in consciousness, not imagery – a view supported by evidence of neural similarities between aphantasics and typical imagers during relevant tasks. I develop a very different explanation which appeals to a distinction, not between conscious and unconscious imagery, but between visual-object and spatial imagery. Standard measures of imagery, especially Marks’ VVIQ, primarily assess visual-object imagery; yet most traditional imagery tasks are fundamentally spatial. We can thus solve the puzzle if aphantasic performance reflects spared spatial imagery, whereas aphantasic reports reflect impaired visual-object imagery.

I defend this spatial-imagery account through two distinctive predictions. First, I argue that aphantasics do report spatial strategies and imagery in relevant tasks. Second, I argue that VVIQ scores do predict performance in genuinely visual-object (e.g., colour) tasks when semantic and recognition-based strategies are prevented.

Giulia Cabbai (University College London) “The Neural Basis of Conscious Imagery: Insights from Aphantasia and the Role of Volition”

Neuroimaging demonstrated imagery-related sensory representations in visual cortex showing striking parallels to perception, but it remains unclear whether these always reflect conscious imagery. Aphantasia provides a powerful model to test this. However, to test for the presence of sensory representations independently of the ability to generate imagery on demand, it is crucial to examine both voluntary and involuntary imagery. I will present behavioural and neuroimaging evidence for a dissociation between sensory representation and conscious experience, and for a potential role of the precuneus in conscious access to imagery. I will conclude with a model of how voluntary and involuntary conscious imagery may emerge from unconscious sensory representations.

Steve Humbert-Droz (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) “To render possible: the lost advantage of aphantasia”

Aphantasia is now widely discussed in debates about the nature of imagery - and its relationship with perception (Arcangeli, 2023; Cavedon-Taylor, 2021; Nanay, 2023; Phillips, 2014). Imagery, however, is a slightly broader notion than sensory imagination, as it can appear in episodic memory or, subpersonally, in regular perception. It is thus unclear how aphantasia can contribute to the debates regarding the nature of imagination. In this talk, I take up this challenge and argue that aphantasia contributes to determining the aim of sensory imagination. What aphantasics cannot compensate for, in purely imaginative exercises, should indicate, by contrast, what imagination aims at. According to a representationalist view, sensory imagining aims at representing undetermined perceptual properties (Kung, 2010; Langland-Hassan, 2015; Tooming, 2018). Yet aphantasia involves no loss of representational content: aphantasics perform imagery tasks with no significant difference in accuracy from regular imaginers (Bartolomeo & Arcangeli, 2026; Humbert-Droz & Caserta, 2026; Phillips, 2025). What aphantasics cannot compensate for, compared to regular imaginers, concerns engagement with certain scenarios, descriptions, or memories (Dawes et al., 2022; Monzel et al., 2023, 2024; Wicken et al., 2021). This points to a phenomenal view, inspired by Sartre (1940; see also Hopkins, 2024), on which phenomenal consciousness plays a key role in the aim of imagining. I propose, accordingly, that sensory imagination aims, via phenomenal experience, to engage deeply with its content. In slogan form: imagining X aims to render X subjectively possible.

Lu Teng (Australian National University) “Imagery Without Pictures”

It is often assumed that visual imagery involves a phenomenal image that resembles a decaying perceptual experience. In this talk, I focus on forms of visual imagery whose phenomenology is not well characterized in these terms, which I call “schematic” imagery. First, I argue that schematic imagery is a pervasive feature of visual imagery in ordinary imagers. I then suggest that the notion of schematic imagery provides new insights into two other important psychological phenomena. One is amodal completion, for which an illustrative example is the perception of a cat partially behind the curtain. The other is aphantasia, in which some people report lacking visual imagery but perform well on a range of imagery-related tasks. My analysis of aphantasia builds on these arguments.

Nadine Dijkstra (University College London) “When does imagery feel real? Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying perceptual reality monitoring”

Our perception of reality is generative: to resolve ambiguous sensory input, our brain generates the most likely interpretation using an internal model built on past experiences. This same mechanism allows us to generate sensory signals in the absence of input, giving rise to mental imagery. Since perception and imagery rely on the same generative mechanism, how do we know at any given moment that what we are experiencing is real and not just imagined? I will present studies that aim to answer this question using psychophysics, neuroimaging and computational modelling. The results are in line with a mechanism in which higher-order brain regions monitor the precision of sensory signals to infer whether they reflect reality or imagination. I end by discussing a novel research direction in which we explore the interaction between reality inferences and our internal model of the world.

Christian O. Scholz (University of Antwerp) “Alternative strategies in aphantasia (and typical imagers)”

Mental imagery is believed to be crucial for a variety of cognitive tasks. However, the past decade of aphantasia research has shown that people who report severely diminished or completely absent visual imagery (i.e., aphantasics) are able to perform what has classically been assumed to be imagery tasks. This competency is frequently explained by aphantasics recruiting alternative cognitive strategies. However, there is currently neither a review of the available evidence for alternative strategies nor an evidence-based taxonomy of strategy types in aphantasia. In my presentation, I aim to make a first step towards closing these gaps in the literature. First, I will develop a theoretical account of strategy use and assessment, where I argue that competency on a task is underdetermined with respect to which strategy was used to realize said competency. Then, I will review and discuss the available evidence for alternative strategies in the aphantasia literature, starting with the self-report literature, from which I derive strategy candidates that I subsequently compare against behavioral and neurological evidence. Finally, based on this review, I will then propose a taxonomy of alternative strategies in aphantasia. Notably, although the focus of the investigation lies on the strategy use of aphantasics, I will also briefly discuss some evidence indicating that at least some typical imagers also seem to resort to non-visual imagery strategies.

Poster presentation titles

Téo Pesci (Université Grenoble Alpes, France) "Condensed endophasia: bridging aphantasia and auditory verbal imagery"

Jake Spinella (University of Illinois, USA) "Spared Spatial Imagery Does Not (Wholly) Solve the Puzzle of Aphantasia"

Maryam Maghsoudi (University of Maryland, USA) "Zero-Shot Imagined Speech Decoding via Imagined-to-Listened MEG Mapping"

Quentin Moulet (Institute Jean Nicod, France) "Remembering Blindly: Aphantasic Memory as Evidence for a Dissociation Between Episodic Memory and Autonoetic Consciousness"

Chen He (Sorbonne University, France) "Tracking the mind’s eyes: Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Domain-General and Domain-Specific in Visual Mental Imagery"

Iris Barezzi (Université Grenoble Alpes, France) "The effect of interindividual differences in mental representations in a reasoning task on ambiguous spatial problems - a behavioral and oculomotor study (Sima et al. 2013 replication and extension)"

Georgina Brighouse (University of Liverpool, UK) "Critiquing the Narrative Surrounding Aphantasia"

Anna M. A. Wagelmans (Université Paris-Saclay, France) "Mentally shifting in time induces a shift in the amplitude of evoked responses"

Rayan Safa (Université Paris-Saclay, France) "Mental navigation in humans: testing whether internally generated abstractions structure mental navigation of time"

Rocco Chiou (University of London, UK) "A Map of the Imagined: Topographic Principles of Sensory Simulation in the Human Parietal Cortex"

Ana Chkhaidze (Free University of Tbilisi, Georgia) "From dots to faces: individual differences in visual imagery capacity predict the content of Ganzflicker-induced hallucinations"

Sarah Razanamahery (Université Paris Cité, France) "Zoning out & Visualization : How DO these mechanisms interact with the process of remembering to act in the future ?"

Riccardo Wanke (University of Coimbra, Portugal) "Auditory Patterns as Extramodal Carriers: Crossmodal Mental Imagery and the Presentation of Non-Acoustic Properties"

Damien Le Clézio (Université Lyon 2, France) "Is aphantasia characterized by a different cognitive style that shapes reasoning?"

Yusaku Takamura (Paris Brain Institute, France) "Neuroanatomical Alterations in Congenital Aphantasia"

Maël Delem (Université Lyon 2, France) "The Shape of Color Memory: Predicting Visual Working Memory Using Spectrotemporal and Signature Analyses of EEG Data"

Ashley Mathis (New Mexico University, USA) "The Role of Mental Imagery in Visual Search: Task-Dependent Effects on Attentional Guidance and Target Verification"

Alexandros Azaizes (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) "Does Cognition Require Imagery? Descartes, Aphantasia, and the Limits of Imagination"

Bilge Sayim (Ecole Normale Supérieure, France) "Mental imagery can enhance peripheral visual discrimination"

Noha Abdelrahman (New York University, USA) "Associations between mental Imagery sensitivity to musical reward"

Nicholas Langkau (Université Lyon 2, France) "Is aphantasia a spectrum condition?"

Julie Torres (Université Lyon 2, France) "Aphantasia Affects Liking More Than Beauty Judgments in Visual Evaluation of Tactile Aesthetics of Textures"

Lebon Florent (Lyon 1 Université) "A-QUEST: a citizen science project on aphantasia"

Eda Gül Karaca (Bilkent University, Turkey) "tba"