Edwin Burns

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 👇

Prosopagnosia is highly comorbid in individuals with probable developmental coordination disorder - Katherine Jane Maw, Geoffrey Beattie, Edwin Burns, 2024 Developmental co-ordination disorder (DCD) is characterised by difficulties in motor control and coordination from early childhood. While problems processing fa...

Comorbid prosopagnosia. In our paper we recommend any diagnostic assessment of DCD must include an assessment for prosopagnosia. You can read more about it on the link below:

tinyurl.com/294snxus

Developmental prosopagnosia is characterized by lifelong troubles recognising faces. These individuals can therefore suffer anxiety and stress over their face recognition failures. We found over 50% of people with DCD also reported having prosopagnosia. Social issues in DCD could therefore be due to

Developmental coordination disorder is a lifelong condition characterised by problems with movement. It has been associated with social problems, which can contribute to DCD's diagnostic process. However, our recent research shows these issues could be due to developmental prosopagnosia (thread)

Touched that I was nominated for a teaching excellence award in my first full year at Swansea University. I would like to thank the students who took the time to nominate me for the award, and also my new colleagues at Swansea whose training and support really sets you up to succeed. 🥳

Lecturer in Psychology - Hamilton, New Zealand job with UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO | 394487 We are looking for a stellar individual who will bring professional and academic experience to facilitate our portfolio of research ...

the psych department at Waikato (in Hamilton, New Zealand) is recruiting at the junior level, in developmental and/or perception/cognition

(in NZ 'lecturer' means 'assistant professor', and is a permanent role)

📢"Aphantasia as a functional disconnection"! in TICS
A disconnection between the Fusiform Imagery Node (FIN) & the left PFC may explain retained memory for objects, despite lacking subjective imagery in aphantasics.
left PFC, awareness, attention network...🧵
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lCs3_V1r-...

Neurodiversity 101: Superpowers or not..

We recently published a review paper on the strengths in neurodiverse populations like autism, dyslexia, ADHD and developmental coordination disorder (Maw etc al., 2024, Neuropsychologia). This week Prof Amanda Kirby wrote a nice piece on it in her Neurodiversity newsletter. Link 👇

lnkd.in/eannVxKF

🧠📣 New deadline! Submissions to our Scientific Reports special issue on Face Recognition & Prosopagnosia are now open until July 26, 2025.

We're looking for cutting-edge work on the neural and cognitive basis of face perception—both typical and impaired.

🔗 www.nature.com/collections/...

A group of researchers standing outside a building. At first glance they look like different people because they have distinctive hairstyles and are wearing different clothes. But their faces are in fact identical and were generated by averaging many faces. This image illustrates how some people with face blindness (prosopagnosia) find it very difficult to tell faces apart despite seeing them clearly.

New paper out. We asked 29 people with developmental #prosopagnosia (face blindness) what it was like living with the condition and also analysed their objective scores on lab tests of face recognition dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

🐣 Due to the Easter holidays and the high volume of late registrations, we have decided to extend the deadline one final time: Early bird registration & abstract submission 👉 April 23 at 11:59 PM

This is the final extension — no further deadlines will follow

ecvp2025.uni-mainz.de/submissions