Christian O. Scholz (philosophy, University of Bochum/Antwerp), Jianghao Liu (cognitive neuroscience, Paris Brain Institute), and Andrea Blomkvist (cognitive science and philosophy, University of Glasgow) are researching mental imagery and aphantasia, as well as their relation to other cognitive phenomena, including attention, episodic memory, and consciousness. Recently, Christian and Jianghao co-founded the Interdisciplinary Reading Club on Aphantasia (IRCA; https://jianghao-liu.github.io/irca/) to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between aphantasia researchers.
A post by Christian O. Scholz, Jianghao Liu, and Andrea Blomkvist
In this blog post, we will argue that aphantasia rightfully ascended from a niche curiosity to a hot topic across the cognitive sciences, that mental imagery research and aphantasia research stand to gain a lot from one another, and that the future of both should lie in interdisciplinary research and collaboration. This will then allow us to ultimately segue into shameless promotion for the upcoming interdisciplinary aphantasia conference at the University of Glasgow, IRCA 2026.
Aphantasia, the strong diminution or complete absence of mental imagery in at least one sensory modality (Zeman et al., 2015, 2025), has received growing attention over the past decade and was most recently featured in Nature magazine (Quill, 2026). This increase in interest largely stems from the growing corpus of findings showing that aphantasics are not significantly compromised on a range of tasks that were traditionally believed to rely on mental imagery (Bainbridge et al., 2021; Liu & Bartolomeo, 2023; Kay et al., 2024). This puzzle of aphantasia competency (Scholz, 2024a), namely the question of how people who supposedly lack or have severely diminished imagery can carry out tasks that supposedly require it, currently has two main possible solutions (but see also Blomkvist, 2023; Lorenzatti, 2025; Phillips, 2025; Teng, 2026, for important nuances): 1) Aphantasics are utilizing alternative (non-imagery-involving) cognitive strategies (Reeder et al., 2024), and we were thus wrong in supposing that mental imagery is necessary to carry out the tasks in question (Scholz, 2024a; Blomkvist et al., in press). 2) While most aphantasics do not report any imagery experience, they might nonetheless utilize the same (or relevantly similar) underlying neuronal processes to solve the tasks; that is, they might have unconscious mental imagery (Nanay, 2021, 2023; Michel et al., 2025).
Both of these possible solutions to the puzzle carry exciting implications for the cognitive sciences at large. On the one hand, if the alternative strategy solution is correct, this would show us that we might have severely underestimated the flexibility of our cognitive toolkit in solving these (and other) tasks. If, on the other hand, the unconscious imagery solution is correct, the imagery experience that many visualizers take to be causally relevant for their performance on imagery tasks would turn out to be largely epiphenomenal, and aphantasia might turn out to be a model phenomenon to understand consciousness (Liu, 2026) and what function it serves. Thus, whichever solution turns out to be true, the mere investigation of either path promises potentially deep and general insights into the workings of our mind and the relationship between brain, behavior, and subjective experience. Furthermore, somewhat orthogonal to this main puzzle, aphantasia has also been meaningfully connected with discussions about, among other topics, dreaming (Whiteley, 2021), episodic memory (Blomkvist, 2023), attention (Liu, 2026), and interoception (Silvanto & Nagai, 2025), thus arguably justifying the current ‘hype’ surrounding the topic in both academia and popular news media.
While it is certainly true that aphantasia research is still in its infancy (after all, the very term was only coined in 2015), we are fortunate to be able to draw from a rich and long history of philosophical discussion about imagination and, later on, empirical imagery research in psychology and neuroscience (Kosslyn, 1994; Tye, 2000; Pylyshyn, 2002, 2003; Kosslyn et al., 2006; Thomas, 2014; Kind, 2016; MacKisack et al., 2016; Abraham, 2020). For example, we can trace a line from Aristotle’s assertion that “the mind never thinks without an image” to the doubt that is brought up in response to assertions from people who claim to be aphantasics (Faw, 2009). On that line, we can also locate the so-called imageless thought controversy, where the topic of discussion was whether thought without accompanying imagery was even possible (Thomas, 2014). Somewhat tangentially, we can see Hume’s weak percepts theory to foreshadow contemporary empirical investigations into the neuronal overlap between brain activity during perception and imagery (Naselaris et al., 2015; Dijkstra et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2025), which itself is an important signpost for current debates about possible unconscious imagery in aphantasia (Chang et al., 2025a, b; Scholz et al., 2025, 2026). Similarly, the so-called imagery debate, the debate about the underlying representational format of mental imagery (Tye, 2000; Pylyshyn, 2002; Kosslyn et al., 2006; Langland-Hassan, in press), provides vital resources to draw inspiration for potential alternative strategies that could be used to solve imagery tasks. For even if the descriptivists, who argued that mental imagery relies on a non-pictorial representational format (Pylyshyn, 2002, 2003), were wrong about the representational makeup of typical visualizers (though the jury is still out [Langland-Hassan, in press]), their suggestions might help us better understand how aphantasics might solve ‘imagery’ tasks without recourse to depictive representations (Scholz, 2023).
Relatedly, concepts born from the imagery debate, such as Kosslyn’s visual buffer (Kosslyn et al., 2006), which is defined as the totality of the retinotopically mapped areas in the visual cortex, and which itself is a precursor to the currently dominant blackboard view (Pearson, 2019), according to which mental imagery and perception share a representational format and jointly ‘draw’ on the early visual cortex (Nanay, 2023), are not only a topic of discussion in contemporary neuroscience (Bartolomeo, 2020; Spagna et al., 2021, 2024) but are also crucial for the investigation of aphantasia. For if the unconscious imagery view postulates that aphantasics make use of the same (or relevantly similar) neuronal processes that underlie imagery experiences in typical visualizers, then it is crucial to understand where and how imagery is represented in the brain (Scholz, 2024b, 2025).
But the informative relationship between imagery research and aphantasia is bidirectional. For example, consider how aphantasia research impacts Schwitzgebel’s (2011) treatment of introspection and imagery. One of the arguments Schwitzgebel makes is, roughly, that since subjective reports of imagery abilities obtained via the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ; Marks, 1973) seem to be unrelated to more objective tests for imagery, such as mental rotation tasks (Shepard & Metzler, 1971), this should make us pessimistic about the suggestion that people are accurate judges of their own imagery experience. Now, in 2026, we have ample evidence showing that aphantasics can solve mental rotation tasks (Pounder et al., 2022; Kay et al., 2024), as well as that aphantasics differ from typical visualizers on both physiological (Wicken et al., 2021; Kay et al., 2022) and neurological (Milton et al., 2021; Chang et al., 2025a; Boere et al., 2025; Liu et al., 2025) measures. Thus, pace Schwitzgebel, the lack of correlation between self-report and more objective imagery tasks indicates that we are not poor at introspecting our own conscious experience, but that imagery experience is either largely epiphenomenal, or that the tasks in question are not really ‘imagery tasks’ to begin with (Bouyer et al., 2025). In any case, the accuracy of people’s self-reports of their conscious imagery experience (or the lack thereof) seems somewhat vindicated through aphantasia research.
What becomes apparent is that not only is the investigation of aphantasia crucially intertwined with that of mental imagery, but the investigation of both mental imagery and its absence in aphantasia crucially requires perspectives from multiple academic disciplines, including those of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Arguably, the best outcome may result if the researchers in any of these disciplines communicate and collaborate with their peers from other disciplines. Philosophers, for example, are in the exciting position not only to have access to an existing corpus of empirical findings but also to have the chance to actively propose new theoretical frameworks and experiments, which can then be tested by empirical collaborators (see e.g., Blomkvist & Marks, 2023; Krempel & Monzel, 2024; Boere et al., 2025; Scholz et al., 2026). Psychologists and neuroscientists, on the other hand, can consult philosophers for their deep knowledge of the history of philosophical debates about imagination and for much-needed conceptual clarification. For example, next to the everlooming puzzle of aphantasia competency, a crucial task that faces aphantasia research is the development of a fine-grained taxonomy of supposed aphantasia subtypes (Dawes et al., 2022; Nanay, 2025; Scholz et al., 2026; Zeman, 2025), a task that requires not only careful review of evidence but also proficiency in conceptual engineering and creative novel ideas for experimental designs and diagnostic tools. Another important task that demands interdisciplinary attention is the investigation of links between aphantasia, mental health, and psychological disorders (Cavedon-Taylor, 2022; Monzel et al., 2023; Gao et al., 2025; Kvamme et al., 2025).
It was precisely this shared appreciation for the importance of interdisciplinary communication and collaboration that motivated two of the authors of this post, Jinaghao Liu and Christian Scholz, to form the Interdisciplinary Reading Club on Aphantasia (IRCA), a monthly online colloquium where aphantasia researchers from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy meet to discuss their ongoing research and get feedback from their peers. Now, almost 2 years and 20 sessions later, we have decided to turn the IRCA into a (hopefully yearly) conference, with the goal of not only shining a light on the importance of the phenomenon of aphantasia but also the shared idea of endorsing and facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration. We are excited to announce that the Call for Abstracts for the first IRCA conference, 2 - 4 September 2026, hosted by Andrea Blomkvist at the University of Glasgow, is now open. Notably, the University of Glasgow has a rich history in imagery research, with the first research grant on aphantasia (The Eye’s Mind) shared between local powerhouse Fiona MacPherson, herself a mainstay in the philosophy of imagination, and the godfather of aphantasia, Adam Zeman, being partially carried out at the university, including a big conference on art and aphantasia. We hope this interdisciplinary conference will also provide opportunities for connecting people in the research communities of imagination, mental imagery, and aphantasia, consolidating current knowledge, and elaborating future research plans, where Junkyard contributors and readers would be interested in joining in our quest to tackle the many puzzles of aphantasia:
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