🔊 New preprint 🧠 for the first time we show congenital #aphantasia has physical brain anatomy alterations.
Surprisingly, they have structurally intact #visual pathways. Structural alterations instead found in the fronto-temporal and cingulate systems.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵
Looking forward to Themis Karaminis @themiskaraminis.bsky.social as today's guest speaker in the Swansea University Research Seminar series. He's going to be talking about how autism is portrayed in the British press. You can join here
swanseauniversity.zoom.us/j/9288183180...
Autistics (vs non-autistics) "are less likely to make errors in self-assessments of their cognitive performance"? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... "findings provide valuable insights into both the cognitive strengths of autistic individuals and the mechanisms underlying metacognitive biases"
SAVE THE DATE! Australasian Society for Experimental Psychology (EPC) & Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) Joint Meeting from 1-4 July at the University of Auckland, NZ.
#PsychSciSky #VisionScience #neuroskyence
More information to follow!
visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/
A comic I made when I realised I have aphantasia, and lots of things seemed to make sense suddenly
Interesting qualitative paper shows people with aphantasia report troubles with faces, autobiographical memory and navigation.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Aligns with a preprint we released this year that shows faceblindness is a common complaint amongst this group.
tinyurl.com/efkshpt3
40 minutes of functional imagery training reduced anxiety and motivated students with high anxiety achieve their goals. Here's the evidence: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Paper suggests multilingualism may improve mental imagery.
emerginginvestigators.org/articles/24-...
Given multilinguals also exhibit improvements in face recognition (e.g., Burns et al., 2019), possibly by enhancing domain general attention, I wonder if that is responsible here too? #aphantasia
Excited to share a new article from @icevislab.bsky.social! In a sample of over 60 people, we found distinct neural differences underlying object and face recognition in dyslexia. These findings highlight crucial domain-general visual processes that may contribute to word reading challenges.
Feel like this has just captured the attachment style of respondents.
Are you, or someone you know, looking for a funded PhD position? I'm interested in supervising PhDs on topics related to my work, e.g., emerging neurodivergent populations, prosopagnosia, validity of psychological science, or political violence. Get in touch if interested:
e.j.burns@swansea.ac.uk
Not yet. I've been doing a lot of work on aphantasia, and become interested in SDAM through that. Unfortunately, we don't know much about it atm, hence why I want to work with a PhD student to learn more about it.
More specific topics I'm interested in supervising are aphantasia, severely deficient autobiographical memory, interoception, and alexithymia, but open to some related ideas you may have.
Closing date for applications is the 11th of December. PhD positions are funded through the Welsh Graduate School for the Social Sciences:
wgsss.ac.uk/student-led-...
Are you, or someone you know, looking for a funded PhD position? I'm interested in supervising PhDs on topics related to my work, e.g., emerging neurodivergent populations, prosopagnosia, validity of psychological science, or political violence. Get in touch if interested:
e.j.burns@swansea.ac.uk
New paper with @ManuKirberg 💭
Is “unconscious mental imagery” real? The evidence is weaker than it seems. We explain why—and how to move the debate forward.
🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Teilo the corgi out for brunch in Swansea.
A striking personal account of someone's experiences with severely deficient autobiographical memory. While memory conditions rightly garner considerable research interest, the paucity of papers on SDAM is notable, despite difficulties associated with its presence.
substack.com/inbox/post/1...
Just out: JASP 0.95! With sandboxing, a new plot builder, ESCI, and more.
jasp-stats.org/2025/08/02/i...
Regarding first person accounts, Sadie Dingfelder wrote a book about her aphantasia and prosopagnosia
Interesting personal account of what living with prosopagnosia is like.
After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨
osf.io/preprints/ps...
It may be prosopagnosia (i.e., trouble recognising faces) that causes this difference. I've met many prosos who say they don't know what family and friends look like. Our work, linked below, shows this condition is common in aphantasia. 2/2 #bb27 #aphantasia
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Someone with aphantasia talks movingly about how difficult it is being in a Big Brother House with no mental imagery of loved ones. Mentions she does not know what family members look like, but some aphants online say they do know. So why do these differences exist? Thread 1/2 #bb27 #aphantasia
🧠 Just out with @pennypexman.bsky.social “Simulation in the ‘Blind’ Mind”.
We found that even without conscious imagery (aphantasia), people still simulate sensorimotor info when processing language. 💭🔤
"when primary care clinicians classified a child as having definite autism... they were 100% accurate, but only 57% accurate when they indicated a child definitely did not have autism"? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... diagnostic impressions of toddlers referred for developmental concerns
New study suggests aphantasia may be associated with qualitative differences in early visual cortex responses. Suggest there's something unique about how aphantasics' brains respond, and retrieve information, when attempting to generate imagery.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
My first publication in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Varieties of aphantasia
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
