Edwin Burns

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

Distinct neural processing underlying visual face and object perception in dyslexia Developmental dyslexia is a disorder marked by difficulties in reading, spelling, and connecting sounds to written language. The high-level visual dys…

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

Aphantasia and the unconscious imagery hypothesis Until recently, mental imagery has largely been regarded as an exclusively conscious phenomenon. However, recent empirical results suggest that mental…

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.

The Life I Can’t Remember I was born in the 1940s, in the last days of Empire.

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...

Introducing JASP 0.95: Sandboxing, Plotbuilder, ESCI, Parametric Survival Analysis, and Much More - JASP - Free and User-Friendly Statistical Software We are proud to announce that JASP 0.95 has been released and is now available on our download page. JASP 0.95 presents a big step forwards, as you can see from the full release notes. Some of the hig...

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...

(PDF) Is aphantasia a neurodevelopmental condition? Evidence from face recognition and developmental prosopagnosia PDF | Developmental aphantasia is characterised by an absence of visual mental imagery, with many researchers concluding that it is not a disorder.... | Find, read and cite all the research you need o...

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. 💭🔤

Short report: Autism diagnostic impressions in young children formed by primary care clinicians and through telemedicine expert assessments - Andrea Trubanova Wieckowski, Ashley de Marchena, Alexia F ... Formal autism diagnosis is often critical for children to access early, autism-specific services and supports. However, barriers to traditional in-person evalua...

"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

Imageless imagery in aphantasia revealed by early visual cortex decoding Chang et al. report that during imagery attempts, those with validated aphantasia have decreased perceptual BOLD response and higher ipsilateral imagery response. Imagery content could be decoded usin...

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...

Varieties of aphantasia

My first publication in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Varieties of aphantasia
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

(PDF) Uncovering spatial and verbal cognitive profiles in aphantasia through unsupervised clustering PDF | Mental images are a ubiquitous phenomenon for many people. In recent years, attention has focused on a condition defined by the absence of mental... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

What a cool preprint! From @gaenplancher.bsky.social

Different subtypes of aphantasia show different performance on spatial, verbal & perceptual tasks:

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Forgot to add a link to the preprint!
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Strikingly, we showed 16% of prosopagnosics were also aphantasic, in contrast to 4% in the general population.

In summary, aphantasia may be a neurodevelopmental condition in that it cooccurs with other such conditions more frequently than we would expect in the general population.

Given prosopagnosia occurs more frequently in aphantasia, we then asked does aphantasia cooccur in developmental prosopagnosia at an elevated rate?

We therefore tested for aphantasia in a large sample of developmental prosopagnosia cases in a third study.

Strikingly, the patterns between the groups were similar, suggesting that these types of difficulties may be a feature of neurodevelopmental conditions.

This, with the elevated prevalence of prosopagnosia, shows aphantasia mirrors other neurodevelopmental conditions, and so may be one itself.

Remarkably, these patterns of issues occur in other neurodevelopmental populations, e.g., developmental coordination disorder (DCD, lifelong troubles with movement)

In a second study, we therefore compared aphantasic patterns of face processing abilities across various tasks to a group of DCD cases

Strikingly, we found almost 40% of aphantasics self-reported cooccurring developmental prosopagnosia. This contrasts with the commonly reported 3% in the general population.

Also, they exhibited greater difficulties with familiar, than unfamiliar, faces.

One common feature shared across such conditions is that they commonly cooccur with one another at much higher rates than in the general population.

We therefore tested if aphantasia had higher rates of developmental prosopagnosia (lifelong troubles recognising faces) than the general public

New preprint from our lab! 🚨

Developmental aphantasia is characterised by a lifelong absence of mental imagery.

In our preprint on PsyArXiv below, we ask is aphantasia a neurodevelopmental condition, like autism, ADHD, and dyslexia? But how would you show this? Thread 👇