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Re:The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia by wongarsu on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @08:02AM (#18805884)
The abstract of the paper contains the interesting insight "Aphantasic participants' self-rated visual object imagery was significantly below average, however their spatial imagery scores were above average".

From wikipedia "spatial imagery consists of mentally representing spatial relations between the parts or locations of the objects or movements.".

Analysing whether a written description of fight choreography would work in actual 3-dimensional space is very much spatial imagery, a strenght of aphantastic people.

I can also reason about the three-dimensional shape of a banana and create a technical drawing of one, rotate objects in my mind, fold objects in my mind etc. But all this sounds like spatial imagery, and does not involve me actually having a mental image.

Re:The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia by mirimir on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @08:32AM (#18806021)
Arguably, you have mental images. But you just don't "see" them. And if it's true that "their spatial imagery scores were above average", then not "seeing" mental images arguably works better ;)
Re:The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia by wongarsu on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @09:16AM (#18806247)
(Going purely from my experience, so this might be anecdotal)

I wouldn't describe it as "mental images", but I certainly have mental representations. But these mental representations are about the 3d shape, the behavior, texture etc. Images on the other hand are not properties of an object, they are projections of 3d geometry into 2d space (with the added work of simulating light to properly shade the image). I suppose I would be decent at painting if I put the practice in it, but the idea of an actual mental image is foreign to me. For me, creating an image is basically a conscious translation task, and without a medium to record my progress I can't handle at best basic shapes.

Basically talking about images is no different to me than talking about textures, or the propagation of smells, or the orbits of planets.