> where you think of blocks of code as "I can see this on the screen" than "up to the end of the current curly brace," which seems like a legitimate difference in mental processing styles, not a consequence of lack of learning.

I see this a lot. I tend to think of things visually, be it abstract concepts or code. I remember code by how it looks on screen and how it fits together conceptually, rather than the words. I remember the "shape" of pages of specific papers I read 30 years ago that influenced me, but not the precise words - both literally (I remember what the text looks like and how it was laid out on the page) and conceptually (the takeaway of specific "shapes" of text).

To me this seems like a major difference in thinking that alters the type of languages I prefer. E.g. Haskell to me is noise. I can sit down and decipher it. I read many of the original Haskell papers, and implemented my own lambda calculus implementation etc. to try to get my head around it, and many of the concepts stick with me, but the language is too visually messy for me.

I think this distinction of thinking about symbols vs. visual layout is very pervasive.