Right. When I'm asked "what happened in January", I just think back to January. There's no mental picture or anything; I just select for January. Typically I'll use some significant event markers and a sort of relativistic system to remember when things happened (e.g. x happened before y but after z, and I know y was in February and z was early January). No imagery ever comes in to play.
This is really tripping me out that so many people think so differently.
So, you have a time-series database model? Because that's pretty cool. Especially if you're running mentalSQL queries.
SELECT '*' from MEMORIES where MONTH = 'January';
The same happens, for instance, if somebody says "the park"; I don't get a mental image of the park, I just start thinking about things associated with it (typically things that happened there).
I can do the whole "visual memory" thing, but it's a conscious process that I have to focus on, rather than something that comes automatically. That's not to say my visual memory is bad, just not default.
I always figured this was how nearly everyone thought, but after reading this thread I'm questioning it now.
EDIT: also there's some kind of search tree balancing going on, I think. Because sometimes you may ask me what happened in January, I feel like I sort of mentally go over everything and do a quicksort type of process? But only if there's a lot of past events that aren't already associated with the January tag? I don't know it's hard to explain.
I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it. If I had to think of an image the first thing that would come to my mind is a boring old paper calendar, but that's not something I would naturally think of.